Oak launches identity-control plane for managing humans, apps, and AI agents

Identity management used to mean a badge, a password, and maybe a yearly audit nobody actually read. That world is gone. Now companies have humans, apps, and AI agents all logging in, all needing different levels of access, and most legacy IAM tools were never built to track a machine that can act like an employee. Oak, an Israeli startup that just left stealth, is betting that gap is worth $60 million.

The company was co-founded by Shai Morag, a former Israeli army major with three cybersecurity exits under his belt, including the 2018 sale of Secdo to Palo Alto Networks. His last venture, Ermetic, got scooped up by Tenable for $265 million in 2023. He stayed on as chief product officer there until CEO Amit Yoran passed away, at which point Morag told his wife he was done building companies. That lasted about as long as most retirement plans made by serial founders — he teamed up with former Tenable colleague Tal Marom, who'd also worked at Salesforce and in the Israeli military, and Oak was born.

Before writing a line of code, the pair spent months interviewing 100 CISOs and IAM leaders. What they heard, according to Morag, is that current systems are operations-based instead of risk-based: nobody flags an employee logging in from an unfamiliar country, and permissions pile up until someone runs a manual review months later. Oak's answer is an AI connector framework that watches actual app usage and strips unused access in real time, rather than waiting for the next scheduled cleanup.

The $60 million seed round, co-led by Accel, CRV, and Greylock, with AlphaDrive Ventures and Hetz Ventures also chipping in, is unusually large for a company this early, even by Israeli startup standards. Accel partner Andrei Brasoveanu says the bet is really on Morag himself — Accel backed Ermetic's Series A and had promised to fund whatever he did next. Brasoveanu argues that while AI is letting very young founders build fast, identity management is a different animal: it's technically dense and requires navigating byzantine enterprise sales processes that reward people who've done it before.

Oak already has paying enterprise customers, though it won't name them, and a 50-person team that's shifting its center of gravity toward the U.S. Competition is coming — Morag and Brasoveanu both expect a wave of AI-native challengers to legacy IAM vendors, in a market where switching costs have historically kept incumbents comfortable. Morag says this is his last company, and he's framing it accordingly: go big or go home.