Joy Chik Joins NewCore Board

NewCore, a Tel Aviv and San Francisco startup building identity for employees and AI agents, added former Microsoft identity president Joy Chik to its board.

‍

Chik announced in April that she'd leave Microsoft in July, ending 28 years at the company. She led Microsoft Entra, the company’s multibillion-dollar identity business, and oversaw engineering work for Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative.

‍

Microsoft launched the Secure Future Initiative in November 2023, months after the Storm-0558 intrusion, then expanded it in 2024 following the Cyber Safety Review Board’s findings.

‍

NewCore co-founder and CEO Zohar Alon said Chik’s experience will inform how the company builds and sells its product. She joined the board after managing identity infrastructure that NewCore says is used by hundreds of thousands of organizations.

‍

What Does Joy Chik Bring to NewCore’s Board?

‍

NewCore emerged from stealth on June 15 with $66 million in funding and a platform built around human and agentic identities. Three months later, Chik joined as its first independent director.

‍

She knows firsthand how large companies evaluate identity products before putting them into use. Chik also sits on PayPal’s board, where she has worked in public-company governance.

‍

Why Is NewCore Building Identity for AI Agents?

‍

NewCore treats AI agents as first-class identities, since they can spin up in seconds and still need revocable access to production systems. That creates a different access problem from the employee accounts most identity platforms were built to manage.

‍

Traditional systems generally assign permissions according to a person’s role and remove them when the person leaves. An agent may work across several applications while its assigned purpose changes and its access remains active.

‍

Chik said organizations need “clear ownership for every agent, appropriate access tied to a defined purpose.” She also pointed to accountability as agents gain more autonomy.

‍

NewCore gives each agent its own revocation path and uses trust scoring within the platform. For a finance agent that can read invoices or initiate payments, those controls determine what it can reach and how quickly access can be withdrawn.

‍

Why Does Chik’s Microsoft Experience Matter Here?

‍

In January 2024, Chik wrote that demand for machine learning was multiplying workload identities across corporate multicloud environments, making human and machine identities harder to secure.

‍

Having worked inside an established identity platform serving large enterprise customers, she can question how NewCore’s product behaves in production and how customers move from existing identity systems without losing control of access.

‍

What Does the Appointment Mean for AI Leadership Hiring?

‍

Companies deploying AI agents need a named executive responsible for identity and access decisions. That authority may sit with a CISO or CIO, while a CTO or VP of AI owns the systems using those permissions.

‍

Someone has to approve an agent’s access and someone has to be able to pull it. Those decision rights should be clear before the system goes live.

‍

When hiring AI security leaders, ask candidates to walk through a real deployment. A useful interview can start with four points: which permissions were granted, who approved them, how activity was recorded, and what event would have caused the company to shut the system down.

‍