As companies rush to deploy AI agents that can book meetings, write code, move money, and query sensitive databases, a thorny question is emerging: who exactly is doing the work, and how do you keep track of it? A new startup called NewCore thinks it has the answer, and investors have just handed it $66 million to prove it.
The pitch: identities for non-human workers
NewCore's core argument is simple but increasingly urgent. For decades, enterprise security has been built around managing people — employees, contractors, and the passwords, permissions, and access levels that come with them. But AI agents are now starting to behave like employees of their own, taking actions across a company's systems without a human pressing every button.
That shift, NewCore argues, means the next great challenge in enterprise security won't be managing people at all. It will be managing AI agents. And to do that safely, every agent needs an identity — a way for a company to know which agent took which action, what it was allowed to do, and whether it stayed within its lane.
Why identity matters for AI
In a traditional workplace, identity and access management is the invisible plumbing that keeps things secure. It decides that someone in marketing can't open the payroll system, and it leaves an audit trail when something goes wrong. The problem is that AI agents don't fit neatly into those existing systems, which were designed with humans in mind.
If an agent can spin up tasks, call other tools, and access data on its own, a company needs to be able to answer basic questions: Who authorized this agent? What is it permitted to touch? And if it does something it shouldn't, how do you trace it back? Without dedicated identities for agents, those questions get very hard to answer very quickly — especially as organizations deploy not one agent but hundreds or thousands.
A growing category
NewCore is wading into a space that security experts have been flagging for a while. The rise of agentic AI has sparked broader industry conversations about "non-human identity" — the idea that machines, scripts, and now autonomous agents need to be governed with the same rigor as human users, if not more.
The $66 million raise signals that investors believe this is more than a niche concern. As enterprises move from experimenting with AI to embedding it in daily operations, the security risks scale alongside the productivity gains. An agent with too much access and too little oversight is a liability waiting to happen.
The bigger picture
NewCore's emergence is a sign of where the AI industry is heading. The first wave of attention focused on what AI agents can do. The next wave, companies like NewCore are betting, will focus on how to control them — making sure that as software starts acting more like staff, businesses still know exactly who, or what, is on the payroll.
For now, the company has the funding and the thesis. The test will be whether enterprises agree that their newest "employees" need ID badges too.
Source: TechCrunch.
