“We want to go head-to-head with Microsoft and Okta”: NewCore emerges with $66M to re

https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/rjznsdtbfl

Publish Date: 2026-06-15 09:00:00

Author:

Using an unordered list, summarize the following article with between 4 and 8 key points. Israeli cybersecurity startup NewCore came out of stealth on Monday with fundraising rounds totaling $66 million. The capital raised consists of a $16 million pre-Seed round led by Index Ventures and Cyberstarts, and an expanded Seed round that brought total funding to $66 million. The second round was led by Evolution Equity Partners, alongside a long list of prominent angels from the local cyber industry, including Assaf Rappaport (Wiz), Yevgeny Dibrov (Armis), Ofer Ben-Noon (formerly Talon and Argus, currently at Palo Alto Networks), Ofir Ehrlich (Eon), and Yotam Segev (Cyera).The company, which operates offices in Tel Aviv and San Francisco, develops an advanced infrastructure platform for managing and securing identities and permissions of employees, systems, and AI agents in organizations. It was founded in 2025 by three partners: CEO Zohar Alon, one of the founders of Dome9, which was acquired by Check Point for $175 million; Amihai Neiderman, founder of Nym and former senior security researcher at Unit 8200; and Erez Yarkoni, former CIO of telecommunications giants T-Mobile and Telstra. NewCore currently employs more than 50 people in Israel and the U.S.“Investors understand that we can go all the way here. We don’t want to be a target for a quick exit, and the funds support that,” says Zohar Alon, co-founder and CEO of NewCore, in a conversation with Calcalist. “At the current pace, we have enough capital to ensure four years of operational runway. We are a different kind of company, our goal is to go head-to-head with giants like Microsoft and Okta.”In the corporate world, identity management systems are the most sensitive gateway through which employees and systems access information. However, in recent years, this layer has become the main weak point, with most breaches involving the theft of permissions rather than direct server hacking. The challenge has become even more acute with the rise of AI: alongside human employees, organizations are now flooded with autonomous AI agents that are granted access to sensitive internal systems.“The chaos in the world of AI is overwhelming and confusing everyone, especially in the field of agentics, and many companies are trying to do similar things,” Alon explains. “Okta, for example, is currently considered a vendor that the market is very dissatisfied with, and it has experienced a significant number of breaches. These companies’ systems were originally built as operational IT tools, not cybersecurity companies. But responsibility for identity management across organizational systems is too heavy for those who do not understand cybersecurity from the ground up.”According to Alon, attackers’ major advantage today stems from the ability to take an existing identity and generate a large amount of parallel noise within organizational identity systems. “The attack surface of an identity is very large, and it is very easy to impersonate an organizational identity, while current defensive capabilities are limited. However, innovation cannot be stopped, and all that is needed is patience. This is a market that has not been disrupted for a long time, and the challenges are critical. The cyber industry can capture large parts of this budget.”Instead of adding another layer of external protection on top of a fragile infrastructure, NewCore built its identity platform from the ground up as secure infrastructure, enabling it to manage employees, systems, and AI agents in one place while eliminating excess permissions and removing central points of failure. The company’s architecture reduces the risk of credential theft or malicious logins to near zero and allows organizations to migrate from legacy systems gradually and without downtime.The company’s business model is ambitious, and according to its plans, it is expected to generate tens of millions of dollars in revenue within the next 18 months. “Any organization with more than 500 employees must have such a system,” Alon concludes. “I approach CISOs and offer them a solution that already fits within their existing budget framework, but delivers a product far beyond anything they have known. The market is already responding, large organizations are now choosing to adopt us instead of Okta.”According to Lior Simon, a partner at Cyberstarts, which led the Seed investment in the company: “For years, cybersecurity operated in a way where large systems were built to function first, and only then were additional layers of security added. This created a situation where organizations have one identity system and a series of products attempting to protect it.”