Physical badges were all you needed for identity management in a company. But with humans now working alongside machines and AI agents in digital environments, even identity tools built for the cloud era are proving inadequate.
This is the Israeli startup gap Oak he comes out of stealth to fill up, he says. Co-founded by serial entrepreneur Shai Morag, the company has quietly created a single layer of control that governs identity across an organization and is now going public with its product that is generally available and already deployed by enterprise customers, with support 60 million dollars in the seed funding it raised late last year.
The company did not disclose customer names, but said its solution is already generally available and being deployed by enterprise customers.
Outdated credentials and poor identity access management — or IAM, the systems that control who and what can access company data — are a common security vulnerability,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 lacked a unified 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 creating its product: an AI login framework that maps access to actual application usage and removes permissions that are no longer needed in real time, except during periodic reviews.
“Right now, the whole process is very manual and operations-based, not risk-based — for example, there’s no trigger when an employee logs in from an unusual location,” said Morag, a former general who spent more than two decades in cybersecurity. During this time, he had three outings, including sale cyber startup Secdo to Palo Alto Networks in 2018.
That track record helped Oak raise a very large round by local standards, one that fits with its plans to invest heavily in R&D and development, Morag said. “Our vision is to be born a giant,” he told TechCrunch.
Morag’s resume already includes a stint at a giant organization. After public cyber firm Tenable acquired cloud identity and security startup Ermetic for 265 million dollars in 2023, he remained as CPO. But after CEO Amit Yoran fell ill and died, Morag left and told his wife he was retiring.
Rather than back down, however, Morag co-founded Oak with Marom, a product team leader he had met at Tenable who had previously held similar roles at Salesforce and the Israeli military. While in stealth, the two also built a 50-person team and are actively recruiting, particularly in the U.S., where the 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. Morag told TechCrunch that VC interest was strong from the start.
Accel partner Andrei Brasoveanu said Morag’s track record alone was a strong argument. Accel had led Ermetic’s Series A when it was pre-revenue; When Tenable acquired it, Accel gave Morag an informal standing offer to support whatever it built next, Brasoveanu said. “I knew he had it in him to build another company, but this time even bigger and even better.”
With AI as “a democratizing force,” Accel supports founders right out of high school, Brasoveanu said. But when it comes to identity management, experience still counts. “There’s complexity in the product, and there’s also complexity in the organizations that you have to navigate to figure out how to sell something like that,” he said.
Both Brasoveanu and Morag expect Oak to face many competitors trying to use AI as a catalyst for change in a space where vendor lock-in is very deep. This makes it critical for Oak to scale quickly. Morag, who has told his wife this will be his last company, says he won’t retire until he’s given everything he’s got: “I’m going big or I’m going home.”
Pictured above, from right to left: Shai Morag and Tal Marom.
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