NewCore raises $66M seed to manage AI agent identities
Key insights
- NewCore raised $66 million at a $300 million seed valuation for AI agent identity infrastructure built from scratch, not retrofitted from human IAM.
- CEO Zohar Alon previously founded Dome9 (acquired by Check Point); CTO Amihai Neiderman led research at Unit 8200.
- NewCore has more than 10 design partners but fewer than 10 paying customers, with charging set to begin in summer 2026.
Why this matters
Enterprise AI agent deployment is accelerating faster than the identity infrastructure governing what those agents can access, creating a security gap that existing IAM vendors have not closed. A $300 million valuation on a seed round, with fewer than 10 paying customers, signals that investors believe retrofitting legacy platforms for agents is not viable and that a purpose-built challenger can own the category. For security architects and AI platform builders, NewCore's emergence marks the moment agent authentication shifted from a deferred concern to a funded, competitive market with real enterprise urgency.
Summary
NewCore raised $66 million in a seed round led by Cyberstarts, with Index Ventures and Evolution Equity Partners joining, at a $300 million valuation. The company builds identity and access management infrastructure designed from scratch for AI agents, not adapted from human-centric legacy systems.
CEO Zohar Alon, who previously founded Dome9 (acquired by Check Point), frames the problem directly: identity platforms built for humans over the last 15 to 20 years will break under the scale and complexity AI agents introduce. NewCore treats each agent as a first-class identity with dedicated permissions, lifecycle controls, and revocation mechanisms, rather than reusing generic service accounts.
Essentially: (NewCore, Cyberstarts, Index Ventures) are building the authentication infrastructure for enterprises where AI agents now need the same IAM treatment as human employees.
- Split-key architecture divides credentials between customer and platform, removing single points of compromise.
- More than 10 design partners signed on; fewer than 10 paying customers, with billing starting summer 2026.
- Agentic Skill packages provide secure enterprise access for AI coding assistants including Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor.
With more than 50 employees across the U.S. and Israel, NewCore is racing to establish the identity standard before legacy IAM vendors can adapt.
Potential risks and opportunities
Risks
- If established IAM vendors ship native AI agent authentication features before NewCore's fewer-than-10 paying customers expand, NewCore's window to build switching costs narrows significantly.
- The split-key architecture creates a platform dependency: a prolonged NewCore outage could block AI agents from operating across enterprise systems that rely on it for credential access.
- With fewer than 10 paying customers entering summer 2026, NewCore faces revenue pressure if design partners choose not to convert when billing begins.
Opportunities
- Enterprises running legacy IAM platforms face urgent pressure to audit AI agent access policies, creating an immediate procurement window for NewCore's purpose-built platform.
- AI coding assistant vendors whose tools are already named in NewCore's Agentic Skill packages — Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor — gain enterprise distribution leverage through the integration.
- Cybersecurity acquirers including Check Point, which bought NewCore CEO Zohar Alon's prior company Dome9, may watch NewCore's summer 2026 revenue ramp closely for strategic interest.
What we don't know yet
- NewCore's enterprise customer names are undisclosed; which industries are driving early adoption ahead of summer 2026 billing is not covered.
- Whether the split-key architecture has undergone independent third-party security audits, and by whom, is not addressed in the article.
- How NewCore plans to handle coexistence or migration for enterprises already running mature legacy IAM deployments is not explained.
Originally reported by techcrunch.com
Read the original article →Original headline: NewCore Emerges From Stealth With $66M to Build AI-Native Identity and Access Management for Enterprise Agents