Cyera, founded by Yotam Segev and Tamar Bar-Ilan, is pursuing Oasis Security through a letter of intent, the clearest move yet by Israeli cyber founders to turn AI-agent identity into a full cybersecurity platform category. CTech's August 2nd analysis valued the proposed transaction at about $1 billion, while Oasis described the agreement as a letter of intent with completion still in process.
For Zohar Alon, Amihai Neiderman and Erez Yarkoni, the founders of NewCore, Cyera's move adds weight to the premise behind NewCore: software agents need identities that can be discovered, constrained and revoked as deliberately as employee accounts. NewCore emerged from stealth on June 15th with $66 million from Cyberstarts, Index Ventures and Evolution Equity Partners, seven weeks before CTech framed identity as Israel's next AI security battleground. Alon previously founded cloud security business Dome9, which Check Point acquired, and later served as president of Cybereason. Neiderman founded healthcare AI business Nym Health after working as an offensive security researcher and research leader in Unit 8200. Yarkoni approaches the problem from the buyer's side, having served as CIO at T-Mobile USA and Telstra.
That combination shaped NewCore's unusually broad opening move. Rather than build a tool dedicated only to AI agents, the founders want to replace the identity layer used by humans, machines and agents. When RuntimeWire covered NewCore's launch, we noted that Alon was betting enterprises would eventually govern agents like workers rather than disguise them as service accounts. The market has since become more crowded, better funded and more strategically important.
NewCore's full-stack wager
NewCore's June 15th announcement described a platform that continuously discovers identities across directories, privileged-access systems, AI tools and untracked infrastructure. NewCore assigns agents their own lifecycles, trust scores and revocation paths, while applying minimum-access policies to sub-agents and short-lived workloads.
The founders are also attacking weaknesses in traditional human authentication. NewCore says its split-key architecture removes a central point of compromise from identity signing infrastructure, while device-bound sessions and phishing-resistant authentication are intended to prevent stolen tokens from being replayed elsewhere. Those claims will ultimately be tested in large deployments against established platforms from Microsoft, Okta, CyberArk, SailPoint and Saviynt.
NewCore's strategic conclusion is straightforward: whoever governs agent access can become a central security vendor as autonomous software spreads through corporate systems. NewCore says it has more than 50 employees across Tel Aviv and the United States, substantial headcount for NewCore after surfacing publicly in June.
NewCore still has to persuade customers to replace infrastructure that touches every employee and application. Identity migrations carry operational risk, and incumbents already control authentication, provisioning and access workflows at large enterprises. NewCore says its migration approach can upgrade customers in days or weeks. Buyer adoption, rather than architectural ambition, will determine whether that approach can support a new independent platform.
Oak attacks the same fragmented stack
Shai Morag and Tal Marom arrived with a closely related thesis on July 15th. Oak raised a $60 million seed round co-led by Accel, Greylock and CRV, with Hetz Ventures and AlphaDrive participating. Oak calls its product an AI-native identity operating system that builds a live graph of human, machine and agent access.
Morag has sold three cybersecurity businesses: Integrity-Project to Mellanox, Secdo to Palo Alto Networks and Ermetic to Tenable. He later became Tenable's chief product officer. Marom previously led product teams at Tenable and Salesforce. That history matters because Oak is pursuing consolidation rather than a narrow feature. Oak wants to replace the disconnected tools used for identity governance, security and access analysis with one control plane.
In Oak's funding announcement, Marom said the founders interviewed more than 100 security and identity leaders. Oak says the recurring complaints were fragmented tools, poor visibility into actual access use and an inability to govern AI agents. Oak also claims its AI connector framework can integrate new systems in hours, a speed advantage Oak will need to demonstrate across the custom and aging applications common inside large enterprises.
NewCore and Oak therefore share a target while emphasizing different entry points. NewCore leads with security architecture, authentication and agent governance. Oak leads with identity data, connectors and consolidation. Both are asking buyers to treat AI agents as the catalyst for replacing a broader identity stack.
Cyera is joining identity to data
Cyera is taking another route. Segev and Bar-Ilan originally built Cyera around finding and classifying sensitive enterprise data. Cyera raised $600 million at a stated $12 billion valuation on June 10th, led by Evolution Equity Partners, with Cyberstarts, Temasek and existing investors participating.
The proposed Oasis acquisition would give Cyera controls over the identities trying to reach that data. Oasis founders Danny Brickman and Amit Zimerman started Oasis in 2022 around non-human identities such as service accounts, API credentials, workloads and software agents. Oasis raised a $120 million Series B led by Craft Ventures on March 19th, bringing its disclosed funding to $195 million. Cyberstarts, Sequoia and Accel also participated.
Brickman has described the risk in practical terms. An agent can carry valid credentials, follow its assigned objective and still expose data or damage a critical process. Security controls must account for what the agent is trying to do, the sensitivity of the data involved and the duration of the required access.
Cyera says combining its data classification with Oasis's access controls will let customers determine which agent is acting, what information it can reach and what action it can take. Cyera's July 28th announcement positioned the agreement as a way to unite identity and data security inside one AI security platform.
That strategy also explains the reported price. Cyera is buying a route into identity governance rather than waiting to build one while NewCore, Oak and established vendors pursue the same enterprise budget. Oasis gains Cyera's sales reach and financing. Cyera gains a product and team focused on agent access at the moment the category is attracting new founders and large seed rounds.
The budget category remains unsettled
Capital has arrived before buyers have decided where AI-agent identity belongs. NewCore and Oak see a replacement market for identity platforms. Oasis developed a dedicated non-human identity and agentic-access layer. Cyera is folding those controls into data security. Existing identity, privileged-access and cloud-security vendors can also add agent governance to products enterprises already own.
The winning approach will depend on how agents enter production. A security team may tolerate a standalone product while deployments are experimental and fragmented. A larger agent workforce, spanning internal applications and sensitive databases, could force identity governance into core infrastructure. That transition would favor platforms able to connect agent permissions with human ownership, data sensitivity and real-time behavior.
Alon, Neiderman and Yarkoni are betting that the transition is large enough to support a new identity provider. Morag and Marom are making a similar wager through consolidation. Segev and Bar-Ilan are using Cyera's capital to assemble data and access controls before that market settles. The founders agree on the underlying shift: autonomous software is becoming an enterprise actor, and credentials alone are no longer enough to keep it under control.