$60M Seed Bets Oak Identity Management Can Tame AI Agents

Can Oak identity management, a startup emerging from stealth with $60 million in seed funding, solve the access-control problem that AI agents are making harder for enterprises?

The Israeli identity management company Oak is going public with its product generally available and already deployed by enterprise clients, according to TechCrunch. Oak did not name those clients, but said it raised the seed round late last year.

Can Oak identity management turn $60 million into a new control layer for AI-era access?

Oak’s pitch is blunt: identity tools built for earlier enterprise computing cycles are not enough when humans now work alongside machines and AI agents in digital environments.

The company was co-founded by Shai Morag, a serial cybersecurity entrepreneur, and Tal Marom, Oak’s chief product officer. Oak says it has built a unified control plane for identity across an organization, positioning the product as an AI-native alternative to older identity and access management tools.

The funding is unusually large for a seed-stage company by local standards, Morag told TechCrunch. The round was co-led by Accel, CRV, and Greylock Partners, with participation from AlphaDrive Ventures, Hetz Ventures, and angel investors.

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

The size of the round matters because Oak is not selling a narrow admin tool. It is trying to sit in the middle of enterprise access decisions at a time when companies are adding more non-human digital actors to their systems.

That creates a high bar. Identity products are sticky. Oak has to convince security teams that the AI-agent problem is not just another feature request for existing IAM vendors, but a reason to adopt a new platform.

For readers tracking the adjacent enterprise security pressure around agentic systems, XOOMAR’s earlier coverage of AI Agents Trip Alarms in Enterprise AI Security Rush offers useful context. Oak’s launch sits inside that same practical anxiety: who, or what, gets access, and how fast can that access be removed?

Why did Oak build around real-time permission removal instead of periodic reviews?

Oak says it spent months speaking with 100 CISOs and IAM leaders before building its product. The result, according to TechCrunch, is an AI connector framework that maps access to actual app usage and removes permissions that are no longer needed in real time.

That is the clearest product claim in the launch. Oak is not only saying enterprises have too many stale credentials. It is saying the review cycle itself is wrong.

“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,” Morag said.

The company’s framing is that outdated credentials and weak identity access management remain common security vulnerabilities, and that AI is expected to make those gaps easier for attackers to exploit. Oak’s bet is that identity controls need to react to usage and risk signals, not just periodic checklists.

Here is the product contrast Oak is drawing from the available details:

The word identity can mean very different things in news coverage. This story is about enterprise access control, not the political or social identity fight XOOMAR covered in Barnaby Joyce Ignites Christian Nation Identity Fight. Oak’s focus is narrower, but for companies, the consequences are operational and immediate.

Does Shai Morag’s track record explain the size of Oak’s seed round?

Morag’s résumé is central to the financing story. He is a former army major with more than two decades in cybersecurity and three exits, including the 2018 sale of Secdo to Palo Alto Networks.

His most recent company before Oak was Ermetic, a cloud identity and security startup acquired by Tenable for $265 million in 2023. Morag stayed on as CPO after that deal.

TechCrunch reports that after Tenable CEO Amit Yoran became ill and passed away, Morag left and told his wife he would retire. Instead, he co-founded Oak with Marom, whom he met at Tenable. Marom had previously held product roles at Salesforce and in the Israeli military.

Oak has already built a team of 50 people while in stealth. Morag said the company is actively hiring, especially in the U.S., where a majority of Oak’s staff will soon be based.

Accel partner Andrei Brasoveanu said Accel had led Ermetic’s Series A when that company was pre-revenue. After Tenable acquired Ermetic, Accel gave Morag an informal standing offer to back whatever he built next, Brasoveanu said.

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

That explains part of the round. Oak is selling into a complex category where buyer trust matters, and investors are clearly underwriting the founder as much as the first product.

Which questions will enterprise buyers still need answered?

Oak has disclosed the funding, the product thesis, the investor list, the team size, and the fact that enterprise clients are already using the product. It has not disclosed client names.

That matters. In identity management, the proof is not only whether a product can map permissions. The proof is whether large organizations trust it inside sensitive access flows, and whether it can work across messy real-world environments.

The next set of details to watch is concrete:

• Customers: Which enterprises are willing to be named?
• Integrations: Which major cloud and SaaS platforms does Oak support at launch?
• Enforcement: How does Oak act when access should be removed?
• Competition: How fast do incumbent identity and cloud security vendors respond?
• Scale: Can Oak hire quickly enough while maintaining enterprise-grade execution?

Both Morag and Brasoveanu told TechCrunch they expect plenty of competitors to use AI as a catalyst in identity management, especially in a market where vendor lock-in runs deep. That makes speed part of Oak’s strategy, not just a growth preference.

Morag’s own framing is more absolute.

“I will go big or go home.”

The practical watch item is whether Oak identity management can turn that ambition into named customers, repeatable deployments, and evidence that AI-native access control is a separate platform category rather than a feature incumbents can absorb. If AI agents become routine enterprise actors, the winning identity layer will have to govern machines with the same seriousness companies once reserved for employees.

The Bottom Line

• AI agents are expanding the number of digital identities enterprises must manage and secure.
• Oak’s $60 million seed round signals strong investor belief that identity management needs a new AI-era layer.
• The startup faces a tough challenge because existing IAM systems are deeply embedded in enterprise security stacks.