Cyber ​​Security Startup New Core Stealth emerged on Monday with $66 million in funding, which aims to solve a challenge many companies believe will soon face deploying AI agents: how to authenticate, govern and control them at scale.

The seed round was led by cybersecurity-focused venture firm CyberStarts, with participation from Index Ventures and Evolution Equity Partners, valuing NewCore at $300 million after the investment.

Companies are increasingly seeing AI agents as workplace participants rather than software tools. Goldman Sachs tested AI coding agent Devin as a new hire last year, while McKinsey said earlier this year that 25,000 AI agents are already working. With its 60,000 employees. NewCore is betting that companies will eventually need to manage these digital workers like human employees.

For co-founder and chief executive Zohar Alvin (pictured above, center), the opportunity stems from the belief that identity systems have become one of the weakest links in enterprise security. Alvin, who previously founded cloud security startup Dome9. Acquisition through the checkpointsaid that the rise of AI agents convinced him and his co-founders that current identity platforms are ill-suited for a future in which software workers work alongside human employees.

“We know for sure the scale and complexity of these things [AI agents] Adding 15- or 20-year-old identity platforms is going to break them,” he told TechCrunch.

Alvin co-founded NewCore with Chief Technology Officer Amehai Niederman (pictured above, right), a former Unit 8200 research leader and founder of healthcare AI startup Nym Health, and Chief Commercial Officer Aries Yarkoni (pictured above, left), who previously served as CIO of T-Mobile USA and Telstra.

NuCore’s platform is designed to manage both human and AI agent identities in a single system. AI agents should be treated as first-class identities with their own permissions, lifecycle controls, and revocation mechanisms, rather than traditional service accounts or machine credentials, the startup says.

Alvin said the idea for NewCore began to take shape in 2023 while helping to review the technology budget of a company that relied on an established identity provider. After seeing the size of the bill, he assumed that the customer must be satisfied with the product.

“I said, ‘You should be very happy with them,'” Alvin recalled. “He said, ‘No, I’m not.'”

The exchange reinforced Elon’s belief that identity had become a large but stagnant market dominated by vendors facing limited competitive pressures.

Established identity providers, including Okta and Microsoft’s Entra, have begun adding capabilities for AI agents. However, Alvin argues that these efforts have extended to platforms that were originally designed for human employees, while NewCore was built from the ground up for a workforce comprised of humans, machines and AI agents.

“Traditional vendors give you an agentic way of dealing with identity, but it’s one-sided — it’s not integrated,” Alvin said. As one example, NewCore uses what it calls a “split-key” architecture that splits key identity credentials between the customer and the platform, an approach designed to eliminate a single point of compromise.

NewCore also offers an “Agentic Skill” integration package for coding assistants such as Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex and Cursor, which allows these AI tools to access enterprise systems as managed identities rather than manually distributed credentials. Employees can also use NewCore’s mobile app to grant, review and revoke access to AI agents, which Alvin describes as a layer of human oversight as companies deploy more autonomous systems.

The startup has grown to over 50 employees in the US and Israel. Alvin said the platform is being used by less than 10 customers and more than 10 design partners. The startup expects to start charging users this summer, he added.

Alvin has predicted that AI agents could overtake human headcount in many technology-focused organizations within a few years, a view recently echoed by TCS chairman N Chandrasekaran. said AI agents may eventually rival the workforce of an Indian IT services company in size.

Identity will likely become one of the first enterprise systems to be strained by the widespread deployment of AI agents, Alvin said, arguing that companies will eventually need new ways to monitor, authorize and revoke software workers operating on their networks.

“It’s inevitable,” Elon said of AI agents becoming a significant part of the workforce. “The question is, are we going to build the checkpoints in time?”