Oak, an identity management startup founded by cybersecurity veteran Shai Morag, emerged from stealth on July 15, 2026 with $60 million in seed funding raised late last year, according to TechCrunch. The round was co-led by Accel, CRV, and Greylock Partners, with participation from AlphaDrive Ventures, Hetz Ventures, and angel investors. The product, reachable at oak.id, is already generally available and in use by enterprise clients.

Oak was co-founded by Morag alongside Tal Marom, who serves as chief product officer. The two met at Tenable, and Marom previously led product teams at Salesforce and in the Israeli military. Oak built a 50-person team while operating in stealth and is actively hiring, particularly in the U.S., where a majority of staff will soon be based.

The company describes its core product as a unified control plane governing identity across an organization — spanning human employees, service accounts, and, increasingly, autonomous AI agents. Oak positions itself as AI-native and as a direct replacement for legacy identity access management (IAM) tooling, the category historically dominated by vendors like Okta, SailPoint, and CyberArk. Its central technical claim is an AI connector framework that maps granted access against actual application usage and strips unneeded permissions in real time, an approach aimed squarely at the entitlement sprawl that has plagued IAM deployments for years.

Morag's framing of the opportunity is unambiguous. "Our vision is to be born as a giant," he told TechCrunch, a statement that reads less as founder bravado and more as a claim staked on his track record.

That track record is substantial. Morag is a former Israeli army major with more than two decades in cybersecurity and three prior exits. He sold Secdo to Palo Alto Networks in 2018. He then founded Ermetic, a cloud identity and security startup that Tenable acquired for $265 million in 2023, after which Morag stayed on as chief product officer. He left Tenable following the illness and subsequent death of CEO Amit Yoran in January 2025, an event that reshaped the company's leadership and, evidently, freed Morag to start again.

Accel's involvement in Oak's seed round traces directly back to that history. Accel partner Andrei Brasoveanu said the firm had led Ermetic's pre-revenue Series A and had given Morag an informal standing offer to back whatever he built next — an arrangement that, per TechCrunch's reporting, appears to have converted into Oak's lead check with minimal negotiation friction.

The identity problem Oak is targeting has shifted shape considerably since Morag last built a company in the space. Legacy IAM and cloud infrastructure entitlement management platforms were designed around a world of human users and relatively static service accounts, where access reviews could run on quarterly or annual cycles. The proliferation of AI agents — software entities that authenticate, call APIs, and take actions autonomously, often chaining permissions across multiple systems — has broken that cadence. An agent's effective privilege footprint can change within a session, not a quarter, and legacy IAM tooling generally has no native concept of what an agent did with the access it was granted, only that it was granted the access at all.

Oak's real-time permission stripping, if it performs as described in production at scale, addresses a genuine architectural gap rather than a marketing one. Enterprises adopting agentic AI tooling have had to bolt continuous monitoring onto identity systems that were never built for continuous anything. Whether Oak's connector framework can keep pace with the sheer variety of agent frameworks and API surfaces in the wild, however, is the kind of claim that tends to look cleaner in a seed-stage pitch than in a production environment with thousands of interconnected SaaS integrations.

The $60 million raised on a pre-product basis, and the fact that the company already has paying enterprise deployments at general availability, suggests investors were pricing in Morag's exit history as much as any independently verified product-market fit. That is not unusual in cybersecurity, a sector where founder pedigree routinely commands a premium, but it does mean Oak's next twelve months of customer retention and expansion data will matter more to its long-term valuation than the stealth-exit headline does.

Oak enters a market where the definition of "identity" itself is being renegotiated in real time by the rise of autonomous agents, and where incumbents from Okta to Microsoft Entra are racing to retrofit agent-aware capabilities onto architectures built for a simpler era. Whether a startup born explicitly around this problem outpaces platforms bolting the same capability onto existing distribution is the open question the next few quarters should begin to answer.