Mintive Secures $7 Million Seed Round to Scale Enterprise AI Agent Identity Platform

Mintive, an early-stage company that builds identity and governance tools for enterprise AI agents, announced a $7 million seed financing led by Cowboy Ventures. The round brings the startup’s total capital raised to $11 million and adds Coatue, Operator Collective and Hustle Fund to the investor list, alongside a group of high-profile angels that includes Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest, former Google chief scientist Jeff Dean and OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy.

The company was founded by Jiquan Ngiam, now chief executive officer, and Vijay Vasudevan, chief technology officer. Ngiam was the first engineer hired by Andrew Ng to build Coursera and later contributed to neural-network research at Google Brain. Vasudevan helped create TensorFlow while at Google Brain, the machine-learning framework that preceded PyTorch. Their deep experience in building AI systems for large organizations informs Mintive’s focus on simplifying the deployment of agent-level access controls.

Mintive’s platform offers three core components. The MCP gateway lets IT teams specify which cloud services an AI agent may access and what actions it can perform. The LLM gateway routes requests to different large language models while enforcing cost caps, and the agent monitor provides a unified view of all active agents across an organization. The system also enables enterprises to author agents that can run long-running, proactive tasks without constant human supervision. According to Ngiam, the product is designed to be deployed with a few clicks, abstracting away complexities such as sandboxing, memory management and permissioning.

Since launching its product in February, Mintive reports more than 50 enterprise customers, among them fintech firm Ro, payments platform Modern Treasury, the University of Michigan, online education provider Coursera, private-equity firm Apax and generative-AI company Stability AI. The startup’s rapid adoption is notable in a market crowded with solutions from cloud giants Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as a slew of specialist vendors such as LangChain, New Relic and Rippling. Over 40 Y Combinator alumni are also pursuing similar agent-management capabilities.

Cowboy Ventures managing partner Aileen Lee highlighted the founders’ track record as a key factor in the investment decision. Lee praised Ngiam’s disciplined fundraising approach, noting that Mintive’s $11 million total is modest compared with other AI-agent startups that have raised hundreds of millions at unicorn valuations. “He is a grown-up and not chasing a vanity round,” Lee said, adding that many companies risk failure by prioritizing round size over the capital needed to move the needle.

The infusion of capital will allow Mintive to expand its engineering team, broaden integrations with major cloud providers and deepen its monitoring and cost-control features. As enterprises continue to embed autonomous agents into critical workflows, the demand for robust identity and governance layers is expected to rise. Mintive’s challenge will be to differentiate its ease-of-use proposition in a space where large incumbents can quickly add similar capabilities. Observers will watch whether the startup’s early customer traction can translate into broader market share as the AI agent ecosystem matures.