Identity Security Gets an AI Reboot as Oak Raises $60M

Tel Aviv and San Francisco startup Oak came out of stealth this week with $60 million in seed funding to build an AI-native identity operating system, a bet that identity security must be rebuilt for a world run by autonomous agents. Accel, Greylock, and CRV co-led the round, and Hetz Ventures and AlphaDrive Ventures joined.

The raise matters because it names a problem founders already feel. Every new AI agent, script, and service account is another identity that needs permissions, and older tools were built for a slower, human-only company. So as teams add automation, the security surface grows faster than most can track.

What Oak Is Building

Oak describes its product as one control plane that governs people, machines, and AI agents together. Instead of stitching together legacy systems, the company wants a single place to manage identities, access, and permissions. That is a sharp read of where enterprise security is heading.

The timing detail is telling. According to the company, Oak closed the round late last year, then waited to go public until the product was generally available and already deployed with paying enterprise customers. Founders can borrow that move, because arriving with proof beats arriving with a pitch.

The founding team also brings prior exits, which helps explain why a seed round reached this size. Investors are not funding an idea here. They are funding execution against a problem with real budgets attached.

Why Agent Sprawl Breaks Old Tools

For years, security spending focused on the perimeter. That model strains when the number of actors inside a company multiplies. As agentic commerce and automated workflows spread, machines request access at a scale no human directory was designed to handle.

The risk is quiet but expensive. An over-permissioned agent is a breach waiting to happen, and most early teams cannot see every credential they have issued. In other words, permissions, not passwords, are becoming the front line.

Oak argues that identity should be treated as infrastructure, not paperwork. When access control is a system rather than a spreadsheet, it scales with the business instead of breaking under pressure.

The perimeter is less relevant now. The real question is who, and what, is allowed to act inside your systems.

What Founders Should Do This Quarter

You do not need a $60 million platform to take identity seriously. Start by listing every non-human identity your product uses, including API keys, service accounts, and any AI agent with write access. Most teams are surprised by the count.

Next, enforce least privilege. Give each agent the narrowest permissions that still let it work, and rotate credentials on a set schedule. These habits cost little, yet they prevent the kind of incident that can sink a young company’s reputation.

Finally, treat access control as part of your AI infrastructure from day one. Retrofitting identity after you scale is far harder than building it in early, so the cheapest time to act is now.

The Signal Behind the Round

Oak’s funding is another sign that security money is moving toward orchestration and policy control in agent-heavy environments. Investors want the tools that decide access, much as they backed compliance software that embeds rules into automated work.

You can see the same thesis in Oak’s own identity operating system positioning, which frames identity as core infrastructure. For founders, the takeaway is direct, because AI adoption and identity risk grow together.

Oak’s Seed Round at a Glance

Identity Security Questions Founders Ask

What is an AI-native identity operating system? It is a single system that manages access for people, machines, and AI agents together, instead of separate legacy tools bolted onto each other.

Why does AI make identity harder? Each agent is a new identity with its own permissions, so the number of actors needing access rises quickly and becomes tough to monitor.