Physical credentials used to be all that was needed for identity management in an enterprise. But now that humans work alongside machines and AI agents in digital environments, even identity tools built for the cloud era are proving inadequate.

That’s the gap that Israeli startup Oak is trying to stealthily fill, he says. Co-founded by serial entrepreneur Shai Morag, the company has been quietly building a unified control plane that governs identity across an entire organization, and is now emerging publicly with its product widely available and already deployed by enterprise customers, backed by $60 million in seed funding it raised late last year.

The company did not disclose customer names but said its solution is now generally available and deployed by enterprise customers.

Outdated credentials and poor identity access management (or IAM, the systems that control who and what can access company data) are a common security vulnerability, which AI is expected to make even easier for attackers to exploit. Oak also calls itself an AI native, positioning itself as a replacement for legacy tools that were already showing their limits but had no established alternative.

According to Oak’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 application usage and removes permissions that are no longer needed in real time, rather than just during periodic reviews.

“Right now, the entire process is too manual and based on operations, not risk; for example, there is no trigger when an employee logs in from an unusual location,” said Morag, a former Army major who spent more than two decades in cybersecurity. During that time, he had three exits, including the sale of cyber startup Secdo to Palo Alto Networks in 2018.

This track record helped Oak raise what is a very large round by local standards, one that matches its plans to invest heavily in R&D and growth, Morag said. “Our vision is to be born as a giant,” he told TechCrunch.

Morag’s resume 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 remained as CPO. But after CEO Amit Yoran fell ill and died, Morag left and told his wife he was retiring.

Rather than step back, however, Morag co-founded Oak with Marom, a product team leader she had met at Tenable and who had previously held similar roles at Salesforce and the Israeli military. While in stealth, the two also built a 50-person team and are actively hiring, particularly in the U.S., where the majority of Oak’s staff will soon be based, Morag said.

Oak’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 interest from venture capitalists was strong from the beginning.

Accel partner Andrei Brasoveanu said Morag’s track record alone was a compelling argument. Accel had led Ermetic’s Series A when it was pre-revenue; When Tenable acquired it, Accel made Morag an informal standing offer to support whatever it built next, Brasoveanu said. “I knew I had the ability to build another company, but this time even bigger and better.”

With AI as “a democratizing force,” Accel has been backing founders since high school, Brasoveanu said. But when it comes to identity management, experience still counts. “There’s complexity in the product, and there’s also complexity in the organizations that you have to navigate to figure out how to sell something like this,” he said.

Both Brasoveanu and Morag expect Oak to face many competitors that will try to use AI as a catalyst for change in a space where supplier lock-in runs deep. That makes it critical for Oak to scale quickly. Morag, who told his wife this will be his last venture, says he won’t retire until he’s given everything he’s got: “I’ll do something big or I’ll go home.”

Image above, from right to left: Shai Morag and Tal Marom.