Oak, a San Francisco startup building software meant to manage the identities of employees, machines and AI agents, has appointed Bobby Ford, chief strategy officer at Doppel, as chair of its Executive Advisory Board. The move lands just months after Oak emerged from stealth with $60 million in seed funding, and puts a nearly 15-year cybersecurity operator in a position to shape how the young company pitches itself to enterprise security buyers.
According to a release distributed by PR Newswire, Ford will advise Oak's leadership on corporate strategy, go-to-market execution, customer and partner engagement, and executive communications. Oak was founded by Shai Morag and Tal Marom, and the company describes itself as an AI-native identity operating system built to govern human, machine and AI-agent identities, headquartered in San Francisco.
Ford brings a resume built almost entirely inside the security operations side of large corporations rather than the vendor world he's now stepping into. He most recently served as SVP and CSO at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and before that held CISO roles at Unilever, Abbott and Exelis, Inc., according to the same release — serving as the first global CISO at both Abbott and Exelis. The release describes his background as centered on enterprise cyber defense, social-engineering defense, and identity and access management.
Why Oak Says Identity Has Gotten Harder
Ford framed the appointment around a problem he says is reshaping enterprise security: the rise of non-human identities acting on behalf of people inside corporate systems. “Every organization is preparing to run a workforce of non-human identities acting on behalf of real people, at machine speed, across systems that were never designed for it,” Ford said, per the PR Newswire release. He added that identity was already one of the hardest problems in enterprise security even before AI agents entered the picture, according to the same release.
That framing echoes broader reporting on the identity space. As TechCrunch noted when Oak first stepped out of stealth in July, identity management has grown more complicated as humans now work alongside machines and AI agents in digital environments. The outlet reported that Oak's $60 million round was co-led by Accel, CRV and Greylock Partners, with participation from AlphaDrive Ventures, Hetz Ventures and angel investors.
Oak's Pitch: One Graph, Every Identity
Per the PR Newswire release, Oak builds a live identity graph from raw evidence across every identity type, paired with an AI connector framework that reaches applications whether they run on-premises, in the cloud, as SaaS, or as homegrown systems. The company says it governs the full lifecycle of every identity using AI-built real-time risk decisions and root-cause remediation — claims that reflect the company's own description of its product rather than independently verified deployment data.
Shai Morag, who serves as Oak's CEO and co-founder, said Ford has earned the trust of the global security community by doing hard things at the highest level, according to the PR Newswire announcement. Ford, for his part, praised Oak's founders and team for their talent, drive and operating discipline, the release states. The company said it is deepening engagement with large enterprises and security executives, and that Ford is expected to help deepen Oak's relationships across CISO, enterprise security and identity-and-access-management communities.
A Founder With a Prior Exit in Identity Security
Morag's track record in the identity security space predates Oak. TechCrunch reported that Tenable acquired his previous cloud identity and security startup, Ermetic, for $265 million in 2023 — a deal that Calcalist separately pegged at approximately $265 million, closing in September of that year.
The appointment also arrives as federal standards bodies have begun paying closer attention to how AI agents should be identified and authorized inside enterprise systems. The National Institute of Standards and Technology's AI Agent Standards Initiative has included a request for information on AI-agent security and a draft concept paper applying identity standards to enterprise agent use cases, according to NIST. In a separate post, NIST described enterprises and identity-management vendors as aligned around building systems that support agentic identity registries, credentials, rights delegation, policy management and governance.
