The founders
Shai Morag isn’t new to this problem. A former Israeli army major with two decades in cybersecurity, he previously built and sold Secdo to Palo Alto Networks in 2018, then co-founded cloud identity company Ermetic and sold that to Tenable for $265 million in 2023, staying on as Chief Product Officer. His new co-founder, Tal Marom, led product teams at Tenable and Salesforce and, like Morag, came up through the Israeli military’s technical units. Between them, Oak’s founding team has already shipped two identity/security exits — this is a third attempt at the same underlying problem, not a first-timer’s bet.
Why now
Identity and access management used to mean provisioning employee accounts and running quarterly access reviews. That model is breaking under two pressures at once: cloud environments sprawled access far past what any human review cycle can keep up with, and now AI agents are being granted their own credentials and permissions, often more broadly than a careful admin would allow a person. Oak’s pitch is that legacy IAM — built for a world of mostly-static human accounts — simply wasn’t designed for a population of non-human identities that spin up, act, and multiply continuously.
What Oak does
Oak positions itself as an AI-native control plane that governs identity across an organization by mapping granted access against actual usage, then stripping unnecessary permissions in real time rather than waiting for a scheduled review. Its connector framework operates on risk-based triggers instead of manual, operations-driven audits — the system is meant to act continuously, not periodically.
The round
Oak raised $60 million in seed funding led by Accel, CRV, and Greylock Partners, with participation from AlphaDrive Ventures, Hetz Ventures, and angel investors — an unusually large seed check that reflects both the founders’ track record and investor appetite for identity/security infrastructure built for agentic AI. The company says its product is already generally available, with enterprise customers deployed during its stealth period (names undisclosed). Oak is based in Israel and grew to roughly 50 people in stealth, with plans to build out a majority U.S.-based team as it scales.
Why it matters for founders
Oak is a data point in a broader shift: as founders adopt AI agents that touch production systems, “who can access what, and are they still using it” stops being a compliance checkbox and becomes an active attack surface. Teams evaluating agent frameworks or expanding automated workflows into sensitive systems are the ones most likely to feel this problem first — and to be Oak’s early buyers.