Oak Inc., a startup that helps companies prevent unauthorized access to their applications, launched today with $60 million in seed funding. 

Accel, Greylock Partners and CRV jointly led the round. They were joined by Hetz Ventures, AlphaDrive Ventures and several unnamed angel investors.

Tel Aviv-based Oak is led by Chief Executive Officer Shai Morag, who earlier founded three other cybersecurity startups. The first was acquired by Mellanox, a network equipment supplier that was itself sold to Nvidia Corp. in 2020. The other two companies were bought by Palo Alto Networks Inc. and venture-backed cybersecurity provider Tenable Inc.

Each employee at a large enterprise has access to multiple business applications. Furthermore, many workers use artificial intelligence agents that themselves use several programs. That makes it difficult to track who accesses what and when, which can lead to cybersecurity issues.

Oak provides a platform that automatically maps out the access permissions in a corporate network. According to the company, its software identifies every employee’s application accounts and AI agents. It then uses that information to find potential risks.

Many enterprises implement a cybersecurity best practice known as separation of duties, or SoD. It specifies that a single employee shouldn’t have access to multiple sensitive components of the same system. For example, a company may wish to ensure that workers who can download files from a database don’t have permission to modify the database’s user access logs.

The platform can identify accounts that don’t implement SoD correctly. It also spots other issues, such as AI agents that have access to services they don’t strictly require to perform their work. Unnecessary access permissions can become a source of risk if hackers compromise an AI agent.

Oak displays the issues that it finds in a ChatGPT-like interface. Administrators can use natural language prompts to collect more information about an incident and request remediation suggestions. Furthermore, Oak can fix some issues automatically. Before the platform implements a fix, it generates a step-by-step overview of its remediation plan and requests approval.

It collects the telemetry that it uses to spot cybersecurity gaps via prepackaged integrations with popular software products. In some cases, setting up such connectors can take months of work. Oak says its platform enables customers to complete the task in a few days. Furthermore, it can collect telemetry from systems that don’t provide an application programming interface for connector developers.

“I’ve built several companies in this space, so I understand why identity has stayed broken for so long,” Morag said. “The tools were never built to work as one, and adding more of them was never going to fix it.”

Oak will use the proceeds from its funding round to hire more engineers.

Photo: Oak