Building the AI-Native Identity Operating System: Why We're Backing Oak

Identity determines who gets into a company's systems and who doesn't, making it the primary attack vector for anyone trying to break in. Yet the tools most enterprises use to manage identity were built for a simpler world: employees logging into static environments from company laptops. As machine and AI identities multiply, companies are struggling to answer a basic question: who has access, right now. Legacy vendors have mostly responded by bolting AI features onto products that weren't built for this moment.

Enter Oak. Shai Morag is building cybersecurity's identity operating system, joined by co-founder Tal Marom. Their AI-native platform replaces a fragmented stack of tools with a single control plane that governs all of an organization's identities: employee, machine, and agent. It connects to any system and builds its understanding of each identity from raw evidence, rather than the static records traditional tools depend on. Today, we announced we're backing Oak at inception, co-leading their $60M seed round alongside Greylock Partners and CRV.

This isn't our first time partnering with Shai. We previously backed his cybersecurity company Ermetic, which Tenable acquired in 2023. He was already a seasoned entrepreneur by then, having founded and sold two companies before Ermetic, and it was clear that he had a rare instinct for spotting security problems before they become obvious to everyone else. Backing him a second time was one of the easiest decisions we've made. At Oak, Shai and Tal have built a team of identity veterans and AI specialists with the experience and product judgment to take on one of the hardest problems remaining in enterprise security.

Gartner predicts that by 2028, 70% of CISOs will adopt identity visibility and intelligence capabilities to shrink the identity attack surface. Oak has the team, the timing, and the technology to redefine this growing category, and we've committed at inception to help them do it. Welcome to the Accel family, Oak, and welcome back, Shai.