NewCore stepped out of stealth with a $66 million seed round to issue identities for AI agents running inside large companies. The Israeli-American startup is aiming straight at Okta’s turf, just as Goldman Sachs and McKinsey already operate tens of thousands of agents in production.
Key Takeaways
- NewCore closed a $66M seed led by Cyberstarts at a $300M post-money valuation.
- The platform handles human users and AI agents in one system, with a split-key architecture for credentials.
- McKinsey already runs 25,000 AI agents next to 60,000 human staff, proof that buyers are ready.
A seed that doesn’t look like a seed
NewCore announced its funding on June 15 and the numbers stand out. The round reached 66 million dollars, led by Cyberstarts with Index Ventures and Evolution Equity Partners also writing checks. The valuation post-money landed at 300 million dollars, a level usually reserved for Series B players in the security space.
The company is co-founded by Zohar Alon as CEO, a well-known figure on the Israeli cyber scene, alongside Amihai Neiderman as CTO and Erez Yarkoni as CCO. The team already counts more than 50 employees split between the United States and Israel, meaning the round funded an existing execution, not a slide deck.
The pitch is sharp. NewCore wants to be the single platform where companies manage every identity in their stack, human or machine. AI agents are treated as first-class identities with their own permissions, lifecycle, and revocation flow.
The architecture relies on a so-called split-key mechanism. Credentials are cut into two parts held in separate locations, one on the customer side and one on the NewCore side, so no party can misuse them alone. The product ships with ready-made integrations for popular coding assistants such as Claude, Codex, or Cursor.
On the commercial side, NewCore is still in early going. Fewer than ten paying customers so far, with more than ten design partners in the pipeline. Paid billing only kicks in this summer, suggesting the round was sized to fund a long enterprise sales cycle.
The bet: take Okta’s seat for AI
NewCore states its angle clearly. Legacy identity platforms such as Okta or Microsoft Entra were designed for human staff, and they were never built for the speed and volume of autonomous agents. The startup goes after that incumbent stack head-on.
According to the founders, the scale and complexity of AI agents will break identity platforms built fifteen or twenty years ago. The line is meant for CISOs sitting on legacy contracts and feeling the pressure of thousands of new agent accounts every quarter.
The timing fits the demand. The rise of code copilots, business assistants, and transactional agents forces IT teams to manage accounts that spin up, run, and disappear in hours. Static roles, monthly password rotations, or quarterly access reviews simply cannot keep up.
The promise breaks into three steps. Give each agent a unique, traceable identifier. Assign it a strict access scope that can be edited in real time. Allow instant revocation when something goes wrong, the way a corporate badge can be cut off in seconds. It mirrors the old IAM playbook, but at the pace of AI infrastructure.
The market NewCore is chasing could reach several billion dollars within three years. If every agent in production becomes a billable identity, the metric that drives IAM vendors shifts from headcount to agent count. That switch puts the existing market leaders under direct pressure.
Also on Horizon:
- Amazon vs Anthropic: the dagger that killed Fable 5
- KPMG AI report pulled after hallucinated client cases
- Meta AI Gateway: Bosworth cuts off internal tokenmaxxing
When AI agents become employees
NewCore‘s bet rests on a shift already visible inside large corporates. Goldman Sachs tested the coding agent Devin as a virtual hire, complete with a manager, tasks, and an account. McKinsey goes much further, running 25,000 AI agents alongside its 60,000 human consultants.
In the short term, those rollouts expose an operational gap. Security teams need to decide who can spawn an agent, who can give it access to a CRM, and how to audit what it does. Without a dedicated tool, every business unit improvises its own setup, which multiplies attack surfaces.
That dynamic plugs into a broader trend toward mostly automated organizations, as Javier Milei’s recent push for AI-only companies illustrates. Politicians talk about a long horizon of transformation, but NewCore is selling the plumbing companies need to start tomorrow.
In the medium term, regulation will move in. When an agent acts on a bank account or signs a supplier contract, the chain of responsibility has to lead back to a named human. European and US regulators are starting to demand dedicated audit logs, and NewCore lands right on that compliance need.
One risk remains for the startup. Okta and Microsoft Entra are not standing still, and both vendors are rolling out modules dedicated to machine identities. The window NewCore has to install its own standard before the incumbents push back is measured in months, not years. The 66 million in fresh cash will be spent to move quickly.
Follow the story on Horizon.
