Oak Emerges with $60M to Tackle AI-Driven Identity Management

to Tackle AI-Driven Identity Management">

Physical badges used to be all you needed for identity management at a company. But with humans now working alongside machines and AI agents in digital environments, even the identity tools built for the cloud era are proving inadequate. That's the gap Israeli startup Oak is stepping out of stealth to fill, it says.

Co-founded by serial entrepreneur Shai Morag, the company has been quietly building a unified control plane that governs identity across an organization, and is now emerging publicly with its product generally available and already deployed by enterprise clients, backed by $60 million in seed funding that it raised late last year. The company didn't disclose client names, but said its solution is already generally available and deployed by enterprise clients. Outdated credentials and poor identity access management — or IAM, the systems that control who and what can access company data — are a common security vulnerability, one that AI is expected to make even easier for attackers to exploit.

Oak also calls itself AI-native, positioning itself as a replacement for legacy tools that were already showing their limits but had no consolidated alternative. According to Oak's other co-founder, chief product officer Tal Marom, the startup spent months talking to 100 CISOs and IAM leaders before building its product: an AI connector framework that maps access to actual app usage and removes permissions that are no longer needed in real time, rather than only during periodic reviews. "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," said Morag, a former army major who spent more than two decades in cybersecurity.

During that time, he had three exits, including selling cyber startup Secdo to Palo Alto Networks in 2018. This track record helped Oak raise what is a very big round by local standards, one that matches its plans to invest heavily in R&D and growth, Morag said. "Our vision is to be born as a giant," he told TechCrunch.

Morag's résumé already includes a stint at a giant organization. After public cyber company Tenable acquired his cloud identity and security startup Ermetic for $265 million in 2023, he stayed on as CPO. But after CEO Amit Yoran became ill and passed away , Morag left and told his wife he'd retire.

Instead of stepping back, though, Morag co-founded Oak with Marom, a product team lead he'd met at Tenable who'd previously held similar roles at Salesforce and in the Israeli military. While in stealth, the two also built a team of 50 people and are actively hiring, particularly in the U.S., where a majority of Oak's staff will soon be based, Morag said. Oak's $60 million round was co-led by Accel, CRV, and Greylock Partners, with participation from AlphaDrive Ventures, Hetz Ventures, and angel investors.