NewCore raises $66 million to secure AI agents as enterprise identities

A new identity startup is betting the next major security failure will involve an AI agent, not an employee. NewCore emerged from stealth with $66 million in funding to rebuild workforce identity for a world where humans, machines and AI agents all need distinct access controls. The company says agents can spin up in seconds and should receive fine-grained, revocable access to production systems, not the static permissions inherited from employee logins.

NewCore argues that legacy identity platforms were built about 15 years ago for workers logging into web apps, and that they were never designed for software that can act autonomously, inherit credentials and touch production systems at machine speed. Its platform is intended to discover, secure and govern every identity in the modern enterprise, with AI agents treated as first-class identities with their own lifecycle, trust scoring and revocation path. The company says its Secure Split Key approach is meant to remove single points of failure in SAML and OIDC signing infrastructure and reduce attack paths tied to Golden SAML, adversary-in-the-middle attacks, session theft, token replay and supply-chain exposure at identity vendors.

The funding came from Cyberstarts, Index Ventures and Evolution Equity Partners. NewCore’s founding team includes CEO Zohar Alon, CTO Amihai Neiderman and CCO Erez Yarkoni. The company was founded in 2025, operates in Tel Aviv and San Francisco, and says it has more than 50 employees and roughly four years of runway. It is also positioning itself to compete directly with Microsoft and Okta as identity tools become central to how companies manage AI-driven work.

The timing reflects a broader shift already underway across enterprise security. Microsoft said in May 2025 that every organization is expected to be on a path to becoming a Frontier Firm within two to five years, and it introduced Microsoft Entra Agent ID for AI agents created in Copilot Studio and Azure AI Foundry. SailPoint followed with Agentic Fabric on May 11, 2026, aimed at securing AI agents and other non-human identities. Microsoft has said identity-based cyberattacks account for nearly 80% of breaches, underscoring why authentication, authorization and revocation are becoming the perimeter for the agentic workforce.

NewCore is entering a market where the scale of machine identity has already become difficult to ignore. A 2026 Palo Alto Networks analysis said machine identities outnumbered humans 109 to 1, 99% of organizations had adopted AI agents and 40% of those agents already had access to organizational data. NewCore cites breaches at MGM, Change Healthcare, Snowflake customers and major identity platforms as evidence that the weak point in enterprise security is shifting from servers to identity itself.