Agent Identity Startup Mintive Raises $7M Seed Backed by Cowboy Ventures, Coatue, and AI Luminaries Jeff Dean and Andrej Karpathy
Mintive, an early-stage startup focused on agent management, is one to watch—not only because of its founders' pedigrees but also because of the impressive roster of investors it has already attracted.
The company has raised $11 million to date, including a newly announced $7 million seed round led by Cowboy Ventures. Additional investors include Coatue, Operator Collective, and Hustle Fund. Angel investors include Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest, Discovery Loop co-founder and former Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, and OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, among others.
Founders with Deep AI Roots
Mintive was founded by Jiquan Ngiam (CEO) and Vijay Vasudevan (CTO). Ngiam was Coursera's founding engineer—employee No. 1, hired by Andrew Ng—and later worked on neural networks at Google Brain. Vasudevan is best known as one of the co-creators of TensorFlow during his time at Google Brain, the original AI training platform that predated PyTorch.
A Crowded but Growing Market
Mintive is entering a competitive field of products that promise to govern, provision, and provide identity management for enterprise AI agents. Its platform includes:
- MCP gateway: Allows IT professionals to authorize which cloud services agents may access and what actions they can perform.
- LLM gateway: Routes requests to different models and can cap costs.
- Agent identity and authorization: Handles identities that may differ from the employees they serve.
- Agent monitoring: Tracks all agents across the company.
- Proactive agents: Enables enterprises to create agents that perform long-running tasks autonomously.
The competition is fierce. Agent management systems are offered by Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic, along with point products from companies such as LangChain, New Relic, and Rippling—to name a few. Countless startups are also pursuing the idea, including more than 40 from Y Combinator alone.
The Secret Sauce: Simplicity
So what sets Mintive apart? According to Ngiam, the founders' long history of building AI for enterprises has shaped a system designed for exceptional ease of use. Setup amounts to clicking a few buttons, the startup promises.
"I think what our customers look at and they are a bit shocked at is how quick it is and easy to deploy," Ngiam told TechCrunch. "We have really thought through all the ways this can be done—all the access control, permissioning layer—to make it so easy for them to deploy that all the complexities are hidden away. You don't think about sandboxes, you don't think about harnesses, you don't think about memory because we manage that for you."
That pitch has won over 50 enterprise customers since Mintive launched its product in February, according to the company. These include Ro, Modern Treasury, the University of Michigan, Coursera, Apax, and Stability AI.
Investor Confidence
It was the founders' industry experience that won over Cowboy Ventures managing partner Aileen Lee.
"AI is going to be able to power incredible things, but we need more infrastructure that's going to give us governance and visibility and control," Lee told TechCrunch.
Lee also said she particularly respects that Ngiam has been careful, raising only $11 million—in contrast to other agent-building startups raising vast amounts at unicorn valuations.
As the enterprise AI agent market matures in 2026, governance, identity, and cost control are becoming mission-critical concerns for IT leaders. Mintive's bet is that simplicity and deep technical experience will win out in a field where even the largest cloud providers are still racing to define best practices.
via TechCrunch