Identity management startup Oak announced itself on July 15, 2026 with $60 million in seed funding, according to TechCrunch. The round was co-led by Accel, CRV, and Greylock Partners, with additional backing from AlphaDrive Ventures, Hetz Ventures, and angel investors. The product is already available at oak.id and is in use by enterprise customers.

Oak was founded by Shai Morag, a cybersecurity veteran, and Tal Marom, who serves as chief product officer. Morag and Marom previously worked together at Tenable. Marom led product teams at Salesforce and in the Israeli military. The company built a 50-person team while in stealth and is actively hiring, particularly in the U.S.

Oak describes its core offering as a unified control plane that governs identity across an organization — spanning human employees, service accounts, and increasingly autonomous AI agents. The company positions itself as AI-native and as a direct replacement for legacy identity access management (IAM) tools, a category long dominated by vendors like Okta, SailPoint, and CyberArk. Its central claim is a connector framework that maps granted access against actual application usage and removes unnecessary permissions in real time, targeting the permission sprawl problem that has historically plagued IAM deployments.

Moreg's background lends weight to Oak's ambitions. He is a former Israeli army major with more than two decades in cybersecurity and three prior successful exits. He sold Secdo to Palo Alto Networks in 2018, then founded Ermetic, a cloud identity and security startup that Tenable acquired for $265 million in 2023. Morag remained at Tenable as chief product officer until January 2025, when he departed following the illness and death of CEO Amit Yoran.

Accel's decision to lead Oak's seed round traces directly to this history. Accel partner Andrei Brasoveanu had led Ermetic's Series A and gave Morag an informal standing offer to back whatever he built next. According to TechCrunch, this arrangement converted into Oak's lead check with minimal negotiation.

The identity problem Oak targets has shifted fundamentally since Morag last built in the space. Legacy IAM systems were designed for human users and relatively static service accounts, with access reviews running on quarterly or annual schedules. AI agents — software entities that authenticate, call APIs, and act autonomously, often chaining permissions across multiple systems — operate on a different timescale. An agent's effective privileges can change within a single session, and legacy IAM tools have no native way to track what an agent actually did with the access it was granted, only that the access was granted.

Oak's real-time permission stripping, if it works as claimed in production at scale, addresses a genuine architectural problem rather than a marketing one. Enterprises deploying agentic AI have had to add continuous monitoring to identity systems that were never built for it. Whether Oak's connector framework can keep pace with the variety of agent frameworks and API surfaces in the wild is a different question — the kind of architectural claim that often looks cleaner in a seed pitch than in a production environment with thousands of SaaS integrations.

The company raised $60 million before launching a generally available product, yet it already has paying enterprise customers. This suggests investors were pricing in Morag's exit track record as much as independently verified product-market fit. Founder pedigree routinely commands a premium in cybersecurity, but it also means Oak's customer retention and expansion metrics over the next year will matter far more to its valuation than the stealth-exit headline does.

Oak enters a market where the definition of "identity" itself is being rewritten by autonomous agents, and where incumbents like Okta and Microsoft Entra are rushing to add agent-aware capabilities to architectures built for an earlier era. Whether a startup purpose-built around this problem outpaces incumbents retrofitting the same capabilities will become clear over the next few quarters.