Israeli startup Oak has officially come out of stealth with a new approach to identity management, aiming to solve a problem that has grown sharper as people and AI agents now share the same digital workplaces.
Backed by $60 million in seed funding, the company says its platform is already generally available and in use by enterprise customers. Oak is positioning itself as an AI-native control layer for identity, designed to replace older systems that were built for a cloud-only world.
The startup's core idea is simple but timely: access rights should reflect how apps are actually used, not just what was approved during a periodic review. To build that model, Oak says it spoke with 100 CISOs and IAM leaders before developing its AI connector framework, which can detect unnecessary permissions and remove them in real time.
Co-founder and chief executive Shai Morag, who has spent more than two decades in cybersecurity, says traditional identity workflows remain too manual and too slow to respond to unusual behavior. He previously led cloud identity startup Ermetic, which was acquired by Tenable in 2023.
Oak was co-founded with Tal Marom, and the company has already grown to 50 employees while continuing to hire, especially in the U.S. The funding round was co-led by Accel, CRV, and Greylock Partners, with additional support from AlphaDrive Ventures, Hetz Ventures, and angel investors.
As digital systems become more complex and AI expands the number of identities that need to be managed, Oak is betting that faster, smarter access control will become a core layer of enterprise infrastructure. The next phase of this shift could shape how organizations secure work in an increasingly automated future.
