Oak’s $60m identity management funding has brought one of Israel’s larger cybersecurity seed rounds out of stealth, as the Tel Aviv and San Francisco-based startup argues that the tools companies use to control who, and what, can access their systems are fundamentally broken for an era of AI agents.
The company, co-founded by Shai Morag and Tal Marom, emerged publicly this week with its platform generally available and already deployed by enterprise clients. It raised the $60m late last year from a syndicate co-led by Accel, CRV, and Greylock Partners, with AlphaDrive Ventures, Hetz Ventures, and angel investors also participating. Client names were not disclosed.
The Problem Oak Is Selling Against
Identity and access management (IAM) has long been a weak point in enterprise security. Outdated credentials, over-provisioned accounts, and review cycles that happen quarterly at best leave windows open for attackers. AI agents have widened those windows considerably.
Oak’s platform maps employee application accounts and AI agents, flags potential security risks including violations of the separation of duties principle, and can detect unnecessary access granted to AI agents, according to SC Media. That last point matters: if an agent holds permissions it does not need and is later compromised, those permissions become the attacker’s permissions.
Marom spent months interviewing 100 chief information security officers and IAM leaders before the product was built. What they described, Morag said, was a process that was far too reactive: ‘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.’
Oak’s answer is an AI connector framework that maps access to actual application usage and removes permissions that are no longer needed in real time, rather than waiting for the next scheduled review.
Oak Identity Management Funding Backed by a Track Record
Morag is not a first-time founder making a pitch about the future of AI. He served as a major in the Israeli army and spent more than two decades in cybersecurity before Oak. He co-founded Secdo, an endpoint detection and response and security automation vendor, which Palo Alto Networks announced its intent to acquire in 2018, with the deal expected to close in the company’s fiscal third quarter. That exit was one of three Morag had accumulated by the time he started Oak.
His most recent venture before Oak was Ermetic, a cloud identity and security startup. Tenable acquired Ermetic for approximately $240m in cash and $25m in restricted stock and RSUs, totalling $265m, according to Ctech, with Ermetic having raised $100m in funding prior to that deal. The Tenable Form 8-K filed November 1, 2023 recorded a forecast of approximately $66m in acquired intangible assets from Ermetic, to be amortised over seven years.
After the acquisition, Morag stayed on as Tenable’s chief product officer. He left following the death of CEO Amit Yoran. He told his wife he would retire. He did not.
Instead, he approached Marom, a product lead he had met at Tenable who had previously held similar roles at Salesforce and in the Israeli military. Together they assembled a team of 50, with hiring ongoing, particularly in the United States, where Morag said a majority of Oak’s staff will soon be based.
Accel partner Andrei Brasoveanu said the firm had backed Ermetic’s Series A when it was pre-revenue and made Morag an informal standing offer after the Tenable deal closed: ‘I knew he had it in him to build another company, but this time even bigger and even better.’ The Secdo deal and the Ermetic exit together, Brasoveanu suggested, made founder due diligence straightforward.
He did add a caveat about the market Oak is entering. Identity management involves both product complexity and organisational complexity: knowing the technology is not enough if a startup cannot navigate the internal politics of selling into large enterprises where existing vendors are entrenched and switching costs are high.
Oak’s headquarters span Tel Aviv and San Francisco, a structure that reflects where the money and the customers are. Morag has said publicly that this will be his last company. His stated ambition: ‘Our vision is to be born as a giant.’ His closing position, for anyone who might underestimate the seriousness of that: ‘I will go big or go home.’
The IAM market is crowded with legacy vendors and a growing set of AI-native challengers. How fast Oak can convert its seed runway into enterprise contracts, before those challengers arrive at the same insight, is the question its next twelve months will answer.
