Mintive secures $11M for enterprise AI agent identity controls
Mintive, a startup focused on governing and managing enterprise AI agents, has raised $11 million in total funding. The amount includes a newly announced $7 million seed round led by Cowboy Ventures, with participation from Coatue, Operator Collective and Hustle Fund.
Its backers also include Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest, Discovery Loop co-founder and former Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, and OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy. Mintive says its product, launched in February, has already been adopted by more than 50 enterprise customers, including Ro, Modern Treasury, the University of Michigan, Coursera, Apax and Stability AI.
Infrastructure for agent access and oversight
Mintive was founded by chief executive Jiquan Ngiam and chief technology officer Vijay Vasudevan. Ngiam was Coursera’s founding engineer and later worked on neural networks at Google Brain. Vasudevan is known as one of the co-creators of TensorFlow during his time at Google Brain.
The company is entering a market for systems that govern, provision and manage identities for AI agents inside enterprises. Its platform includes an MCP gateway that lets IT teams authorize the cloud services an agent may access and the actions it may carry out on those services.
Mintive also provides an LLM gateway for routing requests to different models and capping costs. The platform is designed to handle identities and authorizations for agents that can differ from those of the employees they serve, while an agent monitor tracks agents deployed throughout an organization.
Deployment is central to Mintive’s pitch
Mintive says enterprises can use the system to create agents that proactively carry out long-running tasks. Ngiam told TechCrunch that the company has sought to hide operational complexity so that deployment requires only a few clicks, rather than forcing customers to manage elements such as sandboxes, harnesses or memory themselves.
The company faces substantial competition. Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic offer agent-management capabilities, while companies including Langchain, New Relic and Rippling sell related point products. The field also includes many startups, with more than 40 from Y Combinator alone working on the idea.
Funding discipline amid a crowded market
Cowboy Ventures managing partner Aileen Lee said AI needs more infrastructure that provides governance, visibility and control. She also highlighted Ngiam’s decision to raise $11 million rather than pursue a much larger financing round, contrasting that approach with agent-focused startups raising large sums at unicorn valuations.
For enterprise technology leaders, Mintive’s progress illustrates the operational challenge behind wider agent adoption: agents need defined identities, constrained permissions, observable actions and controlled model usage. The practical business implication is to evaluate these controls alongside any agent deployment, rather than treating governance as a later integration task.