NewCore emerged from stealth today with $66 million raised and a $300 million valuation, betting that enterprise identity systems built around employees and service accounts are not ready for AI agents.
The identity problem AI agents have created is simple to state: the dominant enterprise platforms were built for humans. Okta and Microsoft Entra ID sit at the center of how employees authenticate, receive permissions, and move through corporate software. An AI agent does not fit that pattern cleanly. It can hold credentials across several systems, act without a person sitting in front of a login screen, and accumulate access in ways HR-driven provisioning was never meant to track.
That is the opening NewCore is walking through. The Tel Aviv and San Francisco-based startup emerged from stealth on Monday with $66 million raised across funding rounds and a reported $300 million valuation. Calcalist Tech reported that the total includes a $16 million pre-seed round led by Index Ventures and Cyberstarts, followed by an expanded seed round led by Evolution Equity Partners. For a one-year-old company revealing itself publicly for the first time today, the number is not subtle. Investors are treating agentic identity security as a current budget line, not a 2028 experiment.
CEO Zohar Alon is not positioning NewCore as a small add-on. In a conversation with Calcalist, he said the company wants to go head-to-head with giants like Microsoft and Okta. Alon previously co-founded Dome9, the cloud network security company Check Point acquired for $175 million. He is building NewCore with Amihai Neiderman, founder of Nym and a former Unit 8200 security researcher, and Erez Yarkoni, a former CIO at T-Mobile and Telstra. Calcalist also reported that NewCore already employs more than 50 people in Israel and the U.S.
The company's argument is that identity has become too important to sit on infrastructure designed mainly as an IT workflow. NewCore says its platform was built to manage employees, systems, and AI agents in one place, with fewer excess permissions and less reliance on central points of failure. That may sound like a technical distinction, but it is the whole pitch. If agents are going to act inside Salesforce, data warehouses, internal ticketing systems, and cloud environments, enterprises need to know which identity is acting, what it can touch, and who is responsible when it moves too far.
The story is not that the incumbents have missed the problem entirely. Okta announced its secure agentic enterprise blueprint earlier this year, and TechRadar reported that Okta for AI Agents was slated to launch on April 30, 2026, with tools to discover shadow AI agents, register them, and manage what they can access. TechRadar also cited Okta research showing that 88% of organizations had reported AI agent security incidents, while only 22% treated agents as independent, identity-bearing entities.
That gap is exactly where startups try to carve out categories. Okta has continuity in its favor. Enterprises already use it, IT teams already know it, and convincing a CISO to add an agent-governance layer to existing infrastructure is a shorter conversation than replacing the identity stack. That is a real competitive moat, and NewCore knows it.
NewCore's bet is that continuity eventually becomes a constraint. A platform built around human web-app authentication has years of assumptions baked into it, from session handling to provisioning flows to how permissions are reviewed. Alon is arguing that AI agents change the shape of the problem enough to justify a new foundation. That is a bigger claim than saying the market needs another security dashboard.
The timing helps NewCore make that case. Identiverse is taking place at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas from June 15 through 18, according to the event's website, with non-human and agentic AI identity featured in its program. NewCore is arriving during the week enterprise identity teams are already comparing vendors, architectures, and budgets. A company can spend months explaining why a market is forming. Or it can launch in the room where the buyers are already talking about it.
Whether NewCore wins against Okta and Microsoft is a much harder question than whether the problem is real. The stronger point is that a company barely out of stealth can now raise $66 million for identity infrastructure built around AI agents. That says enterprises have started granting software actors real authority inside their systems before the governance model has caught up.
Also read: Nvidia sells $20 billion in bonds as AI demand outpaces its own cash generation • Sarvam AI is India's newest AI unicorn after raising $234 million from HCLTech • Salesforce spends $3.6 billion on Fin to buy proof it could not build in time
