Mintive, a startup focused on managing identity for AI agents, has secured $7 million in seed funding led by Cowboy Ventures, with participation from Coatue, Operator Collective, Hustle Fund, and angel investors including Jeff Dean and Andrej Karpathy. The company has now raised $11 million in total funding. Mintive was founded by Jiquan Ngiam and Vijay Vasudevan—both veterans of Google Brain and AI platform work. Ngiam was the first engineer at Coursera and worked on neural networks for Google Brain. Vasudevan is known for co-creating TensorFlow, Google’s original AI training framework before PyTorch emerged.
What Mintive Offers
Mintive provides enterprises with tools to manage and secure AI agents. Its platform includes several components: an MCP gateway for IT to specify what agentic cloud services can access and what actions they perform; an LLM gateway that routes requests to different models while managing costs; identity and permission controls that are distinct from those of human users; and centralized monitoring to track all agents within an organization. A notable feature allows companies to deploy agents that perform long-running, proactive tasks.
Since its product launch in February, Mintive has onboarded over 50 enterprise customers such as Ro, Modern Treasury, University of Michigan, Coursera, Apax, and Stability AI. The startup emphasizes ease of use, suggesting that deployment can be done in just a few clicks. Under the hood, Mintive handles complexities like sandboxing, memory management, and access control behind the scenes so users don’t need to configure those details.
Where It Fits in a Crowded Market
Agent identity and management is a rapidly expanding area, with core offerings coming from big cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic, as well as point-solutions from LangChain, New Relic, Rippling and many startups—including over 40 in just Y Combinator. The challenge for Mintive is differentiating itself in this landscape.
Cowboy Ventures’ managing partner Aileen Lee highlighted investment discipline as one of Mintive’s strengths, noting the company raised only what was necessary rather than chasing a high valuation. She emphasized that many newer agentic AI startups seem more focused on fundraising size than on building infrastructure with proper governance and control.
Investors were drawn not only to Mintive’s product but to the founders’ deep domain expertise in AI and infrastructure. Ngiam’s and Vasudevan’s background in building AI systems for enterprises played a key role in winning funding, suggesting trust in their ability to deliver both roadmaps and reliable architecture.
Mintive enters what may be one of the most important infrastructure segments of AI: the systems that govern, audit, and enforce identity for autonomous agents. As AI agents proliferate inside organizations—performing tasks without direct human supervision—controlling what they can do and what data they can touch is critical. Mintive arrives at a moment when the need for agent governance, reliable identity management, and cost control is becoming urgent.
What this means: minting a strong agent identity infrastructure is no longer optional. For enterprises exploring AI agents—not just use-cases—companies need tools to track, gate, and audit agentic actions. Mintive may be on the forefront of building that control layer. Watch how it scales with compliance, AI safety, and integrations as it takes on established giants in cloud and AI infrastructure.
