The Birth of a New Category of Workers
This week, NewCore, a cybersecurity startup, emerged from stealth with $66 million in seed funding, led by the fund Cyberstarts, with participation from Index Ventures and Evolution Equity Partners. The post-investment valuation reached $300 million. But beyond the numbers, the announcement marks a turning point: enterprises are beginning to treat AI agents as what they truly are—digital employees requiring identity, authorization, and oversight.
Goldman Sachs already tested programming agent Devin as a "new employee," while McKinsey reported that 25,000 AI agents work alongside its 60,000 human employees. This is not a distant trend; it is happening now.
The Problem No One Had Solved Yet
Zohar Alon, co-founder and CEO of NewCore, identified a critical gap in enterprise security infrastructure. Alon, who previously founded Dome9 (acquired by Check Point), discovered that traditional identity platforms—many 15 or 20 years old—were not designed for a scenario where autonomous software operates alongside human employees.
"We know for sure that the scale and the complexity that those things [AI agents] are going to add to identity platforms are going to break them," Alon told TechCrunch. The irony is that established vendors like Okta and Microsoft Entra already added AI agent capabilities, but they did so as a lateral extension to human-centric systems, not from the core.
First-Class Identities, Not Machine Credentials
NewCore proposes a fundamental shift: treat each AI agent as a first-class identity with its own permissions, lifecycle, and revocation mechanisms—not as simple manually-distributed machine credentials.
The platform combines two key elements:
- Split-key architecture: Divides critical credentials between the customer and the platform to eliminate a single point of compromise.
- Integration with coding assistants: Through the "Agentic Skill" package, tools like Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor can access enterprise systems as managed identities, rather than manually-distributed credentials.
Beyond that, NewCore provides a human oversight layer: employees can use the mobile app to grant, review, and revoke AI agent access in real time.
Why It Matters for Your Organization
Although NewCore started with fewer than 10 customers and more than 10 design partners, the timing is strategic. The co-founder predicts AI agents could outnumber human employees in many technology organizations within a few years—a vision that TCS chairman recently echoed.
For technology leaders evaluating solutions, the message is clear: AI agent security and governance is not a future problem; it is immediate. As more teams deploy autonomous agents to automate code, processes, and decisions, they will need:
- Visibility into which agents access which systems.
- Granular control to instantly revoke access if something goes wrong.
- Compliance and traceability in regulated environments.
- A platform built from scratch for this new type of worker, not adaptations of legacy systems.
NewCore will begin charging customers this summer. The team of more than 50 people distributed across the U.S. and Israel is well-positioned to capitalize on what Alon calls inevitable: "It's not whether AI agents will become a significant part of the workforce, but whether we're going to build the guardrails in time."