The security pitch sounds almost mundane until you grasp the scale: within a few years, most large companies could be managing tens of thousands of AI agents—maybe more—each one capable of accessing customer data, executing code, or moving money. And right now, most of those agents are logging in with shared credentials, service accounts, or jury-rigged workarounds that make identity and access professionals nervous.
NewCore, a Tel Aviv startup trying to solve that problem, emerged from stealth mode this week with $66 million in total funding—a $16 million pre-seed led by Index Ventures and Cyberstarts, followed by an expanded seed led by Evolution Equity Partners—at a post-money valuation of $300 million.
The company's thesis is straightforward, if a bit radical: treat every AI agent as a "first-class identity" with its own lifecycle, permissions, and audit trail. No more duct-taping agents onto identity systems built for human employees. No more service accounts shared by a dozen bots.
Whether enterprises will buy that thesis—literally—remains an open question. As of mid-June, NewCore had fewer than 10 paying customers, though the company says it's working with more than 10 design partners. Paying customers will start getting invoices this summer, according to a company spokesperson.
Still, the funding round suggests investor appetite for infrastructure plays in the agentic AI wave, even at the earliest stages. NewCore's valuation puts it in rarefied air for a seed-stage company, though perhaps not surprising given the pedigree of its founding team.
CEO and co-founder Zohar Alon previously built Dome9 Security, a cloud security startup that Check Point acquired in 2018. His co-founder and CTO, Amihai Neiderman, spent years in Israel's Unit 8200 intelligence unit before leading Nym Health as CEO from 2018 to 2023. Rounding out the leadership team is Erez Yarkoni, who held CIO roles at T-Mobile USA and Telstra before joining as chief commercial officer.
The company now employs just over 50 people split between Tel Aviv and San Francisco.
Built for a World of Agent Sprawl
NewCore's platform is already live and available to enterprise customers, though the company is still refining its go-to-market motion. The core product manages identities in what the company describes as environments where AI agents could outnumber humans "by two orders of magnitude or more."
The architecture includes features designed specifically for non-human identities. Secure Split Key, for instance, divides signing credentials across multiple locations to eliminate single points of failure in SAML and OIDC authentication flows—a safeguard against the kind of credential compromise that has plagued traditional identity systems.
Another component, VisualMFA, provides out-of-band verification meant to resist phishing attacks. And then there's Agentic Skill, an integration package for coding agents like Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor, which allows those tools to operate within enterprise trust frameworks while maintaining individual identity records.
Each agent gets its own lifecycle management, trust scoring, and—crucially—its own revocation path. The idea is to avoid the nightmare scenario where a compromised agent retains access because no one could figure out which service account to disable.
Does all this matter if you're not yet deploying AI agents at scale? Maybe not. But NewCore is betting that threshold arrives faster than most IT departments expect.
Timing and Competitive Pressure
The funding announcement came the same day that SailPoint, a major player in identity governance, acquired AI agent security startup Entro Security for a reported ~$200 million—a deal that signals both validation and growing consolidation in the category.
NewCore also faces competition from incumbents who aren't sitting still. Microsoft and Okta both rolled out agent identity governance capabilities over the past year or so, embedding them into products already deployed across thousands of enterprises. Convincing IT buyers to rip out existing infrastructure—or layer on another identity system—will require more than a compelling pitch deck.
Then again, the company argues it's starting from a different place. Legacy platforms, NewCore contends, are retrofitting human-centric identity models onto agents. NewCore is building from scratch with agents as the default use case.
The startup plans to demonstrate its platform this week at Identiverse, an identity and security conference running in Las Vegas through June 18. There, it will try to persuade skeptical practitioners that the identity stack they've spent years refining needs a fundamental rethink.
Whether that message resonates—and whether NewCore can turn design partnerships into revenue—will determine if this $300 million valuation was prescient or premature.
