Mintive raises $7 million to manage identity for enterprise AI agents

By Grace Kim

Mintive announced a $7 million seed round led by Cowboy Ventures, bringing the early-stage startup's total funding to $11 million. The company builds agent-management software that governs, provisions and manages identities for enterprise AI agents.

Coatue, Operator Collective and Hustle Fund also invested in the round, Mintive said. Named angel backers 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.

Mintive now has $7 million in fresh seed capital and $11 million overall to support its enterprise-agent platform.

What do Mintive's founders bring?

Mintive was founded by CEO Jiquan Ngiam and CTO Vijay Vasudevan. According to the startup, Ngiam was Coursera's founding engineer and employee No. 1, hired by Andrew Ng, before working on neural networks at Google Brain.

Vasudevan was one of the co-creators of TensorFlow at Google Brain, the AI training platform that predated PyTorch, Mintive said.

Those roles give Mintive direct experience in Coursera's early engineering and Google Brain's AI systems.

What does Mintive actually sell?

According to Mintive, its platform includes:

• An MCP gateway that lets IT professionals authorize which cloud services agents can access and which actions they can perform.
• An LLM gateway that routes to different models and caps costs.
• Controls for agent identities and authorizations that may differ from those of the employees they serve.
• An agent monitor that tracks all agents across the company.
• Tools that let enterprises create agents to perform long-running tasks proactively.

Mintive's platform puts identity, permissions, model routing, cost caps and monitoring in one package.

How crowded is the agent-management market?

As TechCrunch reported, Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic offer agent-management systems. The report also listed point products from Langchain, New Relic and Rippling.

Mintive also faces countless startups pursuing the idea, including more than 40 from Y Combinator alone, TechCrunch reported.

The market combines four named platform vendors, at least three point products and more than 40 Y Combinator startups.

Has the product found buyers?

Mintive says the product has won over 50 enterprise customers since its February launch. The named customers are Ro, Modern Treasury, the University of Michigan, Coursera, Apax and Stability AI.

Setup is supposed to require only a few button clicks, the startup says.

“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 it, 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.”

The product has early commercial traction, while deployment simplicity remains its main claimed advantage.

Why did Cowboy Ventures lead?

Cowboy Ventures managing partner Aileen Lee said the founders' industry experience won her over.

“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.

She said she particularly respected Ngiam's decision to limit fundraising to $11 million. Lee contrasted that approach with agent-building startups raising large sums at unicorn valuations, including Prime Intellect's $130 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation.

“I feel really lucky to have won the chance to work with him,” Lee said. “He is a grown-up and so he was not a person chasing a ‘vanity’ round.”

“I think a lot of companies are being set up for failure by chasing round size, rather than, ‘how much do I need to actually really move the needle for the company?’

“And so, yes, in a time when people are raising unprecedented amounts of money, we’re just kind of doing it the brick by brick, old-fashioned way.”

The $11 million base makes Mintive's financing deliberately measured relative to larger AI peers.

Mintive's next test is whether its February launch can scale beyond 50 enterprise customers without chasing the round sizes Lee criticized.