Oak Emerges From Stealth With $60 Million to Modernise AI Identity Management

Israeli cybersecurity startup Oak has emerged from stealth with $60 million in seed funding and an identity management platform designed to help enterprises control access as employees increasingly work alongside AI agents and other machine identities.

Co-founded by cybersecurity entrepreneur Shai Morag and Chief Product Officer Tal Marom, Oak has spent months quietly developing what it describes as a unified control plane for identity across organisations. Its platform is now generally available and has already been deployed by enterprise customers, although the company has not disclosed their names.

The startup is targeting a growing challenge for corporate security teams. Traditional identity and access management, or IAM, systems determine which users and systems can access company applications and data. But the rapid adoption of AI agents is creating additional identities, permissions and interactions that existing tools were not necessarily designed to manage.

Weak access controls and outdated credentials have long represented security risks. Oak argues that AI could make those vulnerabilities more difficult to manage as companies introduce autonomous software capable of interacting with applications and sensitive information.

Oak wants identity controls to respond in real time

Before building the platform, Oak said its founders spent months speaking with about 100 chief information security officers and identity management leaders to understand where existing systems were falling short.

The result is an AI-based connector framework that maps permissions against how applications are actually being used. Oak says its technology can identify unnecessary access and remove permissions in real time instead of waiting for periodic access reviews.

Morag said many existing identity management processes remain highly manual and are driven more by operational routines than changing levels of security risk. A system, for example, may not immediately respond when an employee signs in from an unexpected location or when access patterns suddenly change.

Oak is positioning its platform as an AI-native alternative capable of bringing fragmented identity controls together while responding more quickly to emerging risks.

Experienced cybersecurity founders attract major seed round

The $60 million financing, raised late last year, was co-led by Accel, CRV and Greylock Partners. AlphaDrive Ventures and Hetz Ventures also participated alongside angel investors.

The unusually large seed round reflects both Oak’s ambitions and Morag’s history in cybersecurity. A former Israeli military major, Morag has spent more than two decades in the industry and previously built several security companies that were acquired.

Among those companies was Secdo, which Palo Alto Networks acquired in 2018. Morag later founded cloud identity and security company Ermetic, which Tenable purchased for $265 million in 2023.

Morag remained at Tenable as chief product officer following the acquisition. He eventually left after the illness and death of former Tenable CEO Amit Yoran and initially planned to retire from building startups.

Instead, he teamed up with Marom, whom he had met while working at Tenable. Marom previously held product roles at Salesforce and in the Israeli military.

Oak plans rapid expansion in the US

While operating in stealth, Oak built a team of about 50 employees. The company is continuing to hire and plans to expand significantly in the US, where Morag expects the majority of its workforce will eventually be located.

Morag said the startup intends to invest heavily in research and development as well as growth, reflecting an ambition to build Oak into a major identity security company rather than gradually expanding from a narrow product category.

Accel’s involvement also builds on its previous relationship with Morag. The venture capital firm led Ermetic’s Series A before the company generated revenue and remained interested in backing his next startup after the Tenable acquisition.

Accel partner Andrei Brasoveanu said experience can be particularly important in identity management because startups must navigate not only technically complicated security problems but also complex enterprise sales processes.

AI creates opportunity and competition in identity security

Oak is entering a market where established identity vendors already have deep relationships with large organisations, potentially making it difficult for newer platforms to displace existing systems.

At the same time, the spread of AI agents could create an opening for startups by forcing companies to rethink how they define and manage digital identities. Enterprises increasingly need to govern access not only for employees and traditional software accounts but also for autonomous AI systems acting on behalf of users or businesses.

Morag and Oak’s investors expect other cybersecurity companies to pursue the same opportunity, making rapid expansion important as the market evolves.

For Oak, the $60 million seed round provides substantial resources to pursue that strategy. Morag has described the startup as the final company he intends to build. Still, his plans for it are anything but modest: Oak is aiming to become a major player in identity security as AI reshapes how people and machines access corporate systems.