Oak raises $60M to unify identity as AI agents spread

Oak comes out of stealth with $60M

Physical badges and even cloud-era IAM tools are no longer enough when employees, machines and AI agents all touch production systems. Israeli startup Oak says it has been quietly building a unified control plane for identity to address that gap — and is now stepping into the open with $60 million in seed funding and a product already in use at unnamed enterprises.

Co-founded by serial entrepreneur Shai Morag, Oak positions itself as “AI-native”, aiming to replace fragmented, legacy identity stacks that struggle with dynamic access patterns and non-human actors. The company says its platform is now generally available and deployed with enterprise customers, though it declined to disclose names.

Targeting IAM’s weakest link

Outdated credentials and weak identity access management (IAM) remain a common security hole. Oak argues that AI will make those weaknesses easier to exploit, by both attackers and over-permissioned agents.

According to co-founder and chief product officer Tal Marom, Oak spent months interviewing 100 CISOs and IAM leaders before writing code. The result, the company says, is an AI connector framework that:

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• Maps granted access to actual application usage
• Removes unused permissions in real time instead of waiting for periodic reviews

Morag says today’s IAM workflows don’t react quickly enough to real-world risk:

“Right now, the whole process is too manual, and it’s operations-based, not risk-based — for instance, there’s no trigger when an employee logs in from an unusual location,”

A founder with multiple exits

Morag, a former army major, has spent more than two decades in cybersecurity and notched three exits, including selling cyber startup Secdo to Palo Alto Networks in 2018. That track record helped Oak close what he describes as a very large round by Israeli standards and underpins the company’s aggressive plans.

“Our vision is to be born as a giant,” he told TechCrunch.

Before Oak, Morag founded cloud identity and security startup Ermetic, which Tenable acquired for $265 million in 2023. He stayed on as CPO at the public cyber company, but left after CEO Amit Yoran fell ill and passed away. Morag says he told his wife he would retire — and then launched another startup instead.

He co-founded Oak with Tal Marom, a product team lead he met at Tenable. Marom previously held similar product roles at Salesforce and in the Israeli military.

Building fast, hiring globally

While in stealth, Oak grew to a 50-person team and is actively hiring, particularly in the U.S., where Morag says a majority of staff will soon be based.

The $60 million round, raised late last year, was co-led by Accel, CRV, and Greylock Partners, with participation from AlphaDrive Ventures, Hetz Ventures, and several angel investors.

VC backing built on prior wins

Accel partner Andrei Brasoveanu says Morag’s history played a central role. Accel previously led Ermetic’s Series A when the company was still pre-revenue, and after Tenable’s acquisition, the firm made Morag an informal standing offer to back his next venture.

“I knew he had it in him to build another company, but this time even bigger and even better.”

Brasoveanu added that with AI as “a democratizing force,” Accel has been willing to back founders straight out of high school. Identity management is a different category, he argued, where operator experience and sales savvy matter more:

“There’s complexity in the product, and there’s also complexity in the organizations you have to navigate to figure out how to sell something like this,” he said.

Both Brasoveanu and Morag expect intense competition from vendors trying to use AI as a catalyst in a sector with deep vendor lock-in. That raises the pressure on Oak to scale quickly.

Morag says he has promised his wife that Oak will be his final company — but he plans to go all-in first:

“I will go big or go home.”