The Oak identity management platform has emerged from stealth with $60 million in seed funding, pitching itself as the unified control plane that legacy IAM tools (built for humans in the cloud era) were never designed to be.
Co-founded by serial entrepreneur Shai Morag and chief product officer Tal Marom, the Israeli startup says its product is already generally available and deployed by enterprise clients, though it has not disclosed their names. The round was co-led by Accel, CRV, and Greylock Partners, with participation from AlphaDrive Ventures, Hetz Ventures, and angel investors. Calcalist describes it as one of the largest seed rounds ever secured by an Israeli cyber company.
Why the Oak Identity Management Platform Exists
Identity access management, or IAM, controls who and what can reach company data. The problem, as Morag frames it, is that existing tools are reactive and manual. ‘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,’ he said.
Oak’s answer is an AI connector framework that maps access to actual application usage and removes unnecessary permissions in real time, rather than waiting for periodic reviews. According to MSSP Alert, the platform builds a live identity graph from data collected across systems, giving security teams a view of which identities have access, how that access is used, and where redundant permissions create exposure. Crucially, it is designed to govern non-human identities too: service accounts, API keys, workloads, and AI agents throughout their lifecycle.
That last piece matters more than it might sound. As AI agents proliferate inside enterprise environments, they generate a new class of machine identity that traditional IAM systems were not built to track. Oak is positioning itself as AI-native from the start, rather than bolting on agent governance as an afterthought.
Marom spent months speaking with 100 CISOs and IAM leaders before the product was built. The firm now employs 50 people and is actively hiring, with a majority of staff expected to be based in the US.
A Founder Whose Exits Do the Talking
Morag is not new to this. According to Calcalist, he has founded and sold three companies for a combined value of approximately $500 million. The first, Integrity-Project, was acquired by Mellanox Technologies in 2014. The second, Secdo, was sold to Palo Alto Networks in 2018 for a reported approximately $90 million to $100 million, with Secdo’s endpoint detection and response technology folded into Palo Alto Networks’ Traps advanced endpoint protection product.
The third exit was Ermetic, a cloud-native application protection platform and cloud infrastructure entitlement management provider. Tenable completed that acquisition on 2 October 2023 for $265 million, structured as approximately $240 million in cash and $25 million in restricted stock and restricted stock units, according to Cooley. Morag stayed on at Tenable as chief product officer after the deal closed, but left following the death of CEO Amit Yoran.
That résumé opened doors. Accel had backed Ermetic’s Series A when it was pre-revenue. Partner Andrei Brasoveanu said the firm gave Morag an informal standing offer after the Tenable deal: back whatever he built next. ‘I knew he had it in him to build another company, but this time even bigger and even better,’ Brasoveanu said.
Brasoveanu also acknowledged that identity management is a space where founder experience genuinely counts. ‘There’s complexity in the product, and there’s also complexity in the organisations you have to navigate to figure out how to sell something like this,’ he said. Vendor lock-in runs deep in IAM, and both he and Morag expect competitors to use AI as a catalyst for their own repositioning. The pressure to scale fast is real.
Morag, a former army major with more than two decades in cybersecurity, told his wife he would retire before co-founding Oak. He has since revised that position. ‘I will go big or go home,’ he said. With a team of 50 already in place and one of the largest seed cheques in Israeli cyber history behind him, the going-home option looks remote.
The next test is whether enterprise buyers, facing mounting pressure from regulators and security teams alike over AI-driven identity sprawl, will move fast enough to give Oak the customer density it needs before a larger incumbent copies the playbook.
