Israeli cybersecurity startup Oak has emerged from stealth with $60 million in seed funding to build what it calls an AI-native identity operating system, unifying access management across human employees, service accounts and the fast-growing population of autonomous AI agents. The round, disclosed on 15 July, was co-led by Accel, CRV and Greylock Partners with participation from AlphaDrive Ventures, Hetz Ventures and angel investors.
Fixing an IAM stack that AI just made worse
Oak was co-founded by serial cybersecurity entrepreneur Shai Morag — previously CEO of Ermetic, sold to Tenable for $265 million in 2023, and Secdo, sold to Palo Alto Networks in 2018 — and chief product officer Tal Marom. The pair spent months interviewing more than 100 CISOs and IAM leaders before writing code. The result is a control plane that maps access to real app usage and revokes stale permissions in real time, rather than during quarterly access reviews.
Human, machine and agent under one roof
The pitch is that identity governance systems built for the cloud era were already creaking under the weight of machine identities, and now generative AI agents that spin up, act and vanish in seconds have overwhelmed them. Oak positions itself as a replacement for that legacy stack, offering an AI connector framework that continuously discovers, classifies and governs identities of any kind. The company's product is already generally available and deployed at enterprise customers.
Big money on Morag's track record
The $60 million cheque is exceptionally large for a seed round in Israeli enterprise software and reflects both the urgency of agentic-AI security and Morag's own track record. Accel had led Ermetic's Series A when it was pre-revenue and offered Morag an informal standing commitment to fund whatever he built next. Oak now has more than 50 employees, with most future hiring targeted at the United States. The launch adds to a busy month for AI-adjacent identity and governance startups, alongside fresh zero-day disclosures in remote access tools and record AI app factory raises.
Reporting based on coverage from TechCrunch, PR Newswire and SiliconANGLE.