{"id":23234,"date":"2026-07-15T11:59:51","date_gmt":"2026-07-15T11:59:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/backed-by-60m-in-funding-oak-steps-out-of-stealth-to-fix-the-identity-mess-that-ai-agents-are-making-worse\/"},"modified":"2026-07-15T11:59:51","modified_gmt":"2026-07-15T11:59:51","slug":"backed-by-60m-in-funding-oak-steps-out-of-stealth-to-fix-the-identity-mess-that-ai-agents-are-making-worse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/backed-by-60m-in-funding-oak-steps-out-of-stealth-to-fix-the-identity-mess-that-ai-agents-are-making-worse\/","title":{"rendered":"Backed by $60M in funding, Oak steps out of stealth to fix the identity mess that AI agents are making worse"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div readability=\"138.24409068982\">\n<p id=\"speakable-summary\" class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Physical badges used to be all you needed for identity management at a company. But with humans now working alongside machines and AI agents in digital environments, even the identity tools built for the cloud era are proving inadequate.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That&rsquo;s the gap Israeli startup Oak is stepping out of stealth to fill, it says. Co-founded by serial entrepreneur Shai Morag, the company has been quietly building a unified control plane that governs identity across an organization, and is now emerging publicly with its product generally available and already deployed by enterprise clients, backed by $60 million in seed funding that it raised late last year.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The company didn&rsquo;t disclose client names, but said its solution is already generally available and deployed by enterprise clients.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Outdated credentials and poor identity access management &mdash; or IAM, the systems that control who and what can access company data &mdash; are a common security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 had no consolidated alternative.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">According to Oak&rsquo;s other co-founder, chief product officer Tal Marom, the startup spent months talking to 100 CISOs and IAM leaders before building its product: an AI connector framework that maps access to actual app usage and removes permissions that are no longer needed in real time, rather than only during periodic reviews.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&ldquo;Right now, the whole process is too manual, and it&rsquo;s operations-based, not risk-based &mdash; for instance, there&rsquo;s no trigger when an employee logs in from an unusual location,&rdquo; said Morag, a former army major who spent more than two decades in cybersecurity. During that time, he had three exits, including selling cyber startup Secdo to Palo Alto Networks in 2018.<\/p>\n<div class=\"internal-linking-related-contents\"><a href=\"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/12-weeks-jail-for-school-it-support-technician-who-took-upskirt-videos-of-teachers\/\" class=\"template-1\"><span class=\"cta\">News :<\/span><span class=\"postTitle\">&lt;div&gt;12 weeks' jail for school IT support technician who took upskirt videos of teachers&lt;\/div&gt;<\/span><\/a><\/div><p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This track record helped Oak raise what is a very big round by local standards, one that matches its plans to invest heavily in R&amp;D and growth, Morag said. &ldquo;Our vision is to be born as a giant,&rdquo; he told TechCrunch. <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Morag&rsquo;s r&eacute;sum&eacute; already includes a stint at a giant organization. After public cyber company Tenable acquired his cloud identity and security startup Ermetic for $265 million in 2023, he stayed on as CPO. But after CEO Amit Yoran became ill and passed away, Morag left and told his wife he&rsquo;d retire.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Instead of stepping back, though, Morag co-founded Oak with Marom, a product team lead he&rsquo;d met at Tenable who&rsquo;d previously held similar roles at Salesforce and in the Israeli military. While in stealth, the two also built a team of 50 people and are actively hiring, particularly in the U.S., where a majority of Oak&rsquo;s staff will soon be based, Morag said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Oak&rsquo;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 outset.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Accel partner Andrei Brasoveanu said Morag&rsquo;s track record alone was a strong argument. Accel had led Ermetic&rsquo;s Series A when it was pre-revenue; when Tenable acquired it, Accel gave Morag an informal standing offer to back whatever he built next, Brasoveanu said. &ldquo;I knew he had it in him to build another company, but this time even bigger and even better.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">With AI as &ldquo;a democratizing force,&rdquo; Accel has been backing founders right out of high school, Brasoveanu said. But when it comes to identity management, experience still counts. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s complexity in the product, and there&rsquo;s also complexity in the organizations you have to navigate to figure out how to sell something like this,&rdquo; he said.<\/p>\n<div class=\"internal-linking-related-contents\"><a href=\"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/migrant-acquitted-in-first-trial-over-us-border-military-zones\/\" class=\"template-1\"><span class=\"cta\">News :<\/span><span class=\"postTitle\">Migrant acquitted in first trial over US border military zones<\/span><\/a><\/div><p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Both Brasoveanu and Morag expect Oak will face plenty of competitors trying to use AI as a catalyst for change in a space where vendor lock-in runs deep. That makes it critical for Oak to scale fast. Morag, who&rsquo;s told his wife this will be his last company, says he won&rsquo;t retire until he&rsquo;s given it everything he&rsquo;s got: &ldquo;I will go big or go home.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Picture above, from right to left: Shai Morag and Tal Marom.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><em>When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn&rsquo;t affect our editorial independence.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><sub>Backed by $60M in funding, Oak steps out of stealth to fix the identity mess that AI agents are making worse<\/sub><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Physical badges used to be all you needed for identity management at a company. But with humans now working alongside machines and AI agents in digital environments, even the identity tools built for the cloud era are proving inadequate. That&rsquo;s the gap Israeli startup Oak is stepping out of stealth to fill, it says. Co-founded&#8230;<\/p>\n<p class=\"more-link-wrap\"><a href=\"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/backed-by-60m-in-funding-oak-steps-out-of-stealth-to-fix-the-identity-mess-that-ai-agents-are-making-worse\/\" class=\"more-link\">Read More<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &ldquo;Backed by $60M in funding, Oak steps out of stealth to fix the identity mess that AI agents are making worse&rdquo;<\/span> &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23235,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23234\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}