Oak exits stealth with $60M to rewire IAM for AI agents

Identity and access management has been quietly the most boring corner of enterprise security for a decade, and it is about to stop being boring, which is roughly the case Oak is now trying to sell. The Israeli startup came out of stealth this week with $60 million in seed funding co-led by Accel, CRV and Greylock Partners, with AlphaDrive Ventures, Hetz Ventures and angel investors filling out the round, TechCrunch reported.

The pitch is that quarterly access reviews and static role definitions were already fraying under human sprawl, and they snap entirely once AI agents start touching production systems on behalf of users. Oak has built what it calls a unified control plane that governs identity across an organization, with an AI connector framework that maps access to actual app usage and pulls back unnecessary permissions in real time rather than waiting for a periodic review. CEO Shai Morag frames the incumbent workflow bluntly: "Right now, the whole process is too manual, and it's operations-based, not risk-based," with no trigger, for instance, when an employee logs in from an unusual location.

The founders are a big part of why this round closed at this size before public revenue. Morag previously sold Secdo to Palo Alto Networks in 2018, then sold cloud identity startup Ermetic to Tenable for $265 million in 2023, where he stayed on as Chief Product Officer. Co-founder Tal Marom, now CPO, came out of Tenable and Salesforce. The 50-person company reportedly spent months talking to 100 CISOs and IAM leaders before shipping, and Accel partner Andrei Brasoveanu concedes "there's complexity in the product, and there's also complexity in the organizations you have to navigate."

The honest caveat is that a stealth-exit story is mostly a pitch. The reporting does not disclose customer names, revenue, deployment scale, or how Oak's control plane is meant to coexist with the Okta, Entra and SailPoint estates already sitting under most CISOs. An engine that revokes permissions in real time is also a good way to sever legitimate access at exactly the wrong moment, and the article does not detail the guardrails.

Still, if AI agents proliferate inside enterprises the way every vendor keeps promising, static IAM becomes indefensible, and a category opens up. Given Morag's exit history, the more likely endgame for Oak is not being born a giant, as he puts it, but being acquired by one.