Mintive Raises $7M Seed Led by Cowboy Ventures for AI Agent Identity

Mintive, which builds infrastructure for deploying and governing enterprise AI agents, has raised a $7 million seed round led by Cowboy Ventures, bringing its total funding to $11 million. The company did not disclose a valuation.

Coatue, Operator Collective and Hustle Fund also backed the company. In its own announcement, Mintive lists Operator Collective and Burst Capital as new investors and Coatue, Hustle Fund and Maven Ventures as existing ones. Angels include Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest, WorkOS's Michael Grinich, former Adobe chief product officer Scott Belsky, former Google chief scientist Jeff Dean and OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy.

Coursera and TensorFlow Veterans Behind the Former MintMCP

Mintive, formerly known as MintMCP, is led by CEO Jiquan Ngiam, who was Coursera's first employee and founding engineer before working on neural networks at Google Brain. CTO Vijay Vasudevan co-created TensorFlow while at Google Brain.

The pitch is that an AI agent should not simply borrow the access of the employee it works for. Mintive gives each agent its own identity and authorizations, which can differ from those of the people the agents serve.

Five Products for Governing Agents

The platform spans five products. An MCP gateway governs which tools and servers agents can reach, with role-based controls. An LLM gateway routes calls through approved models, sets budgets by group and applies one policy across providers. Agent Identity issues each agent a scoped, revocable credential delegated from a person. An agent monitor logs the chain from person to agent to server to model and tracks spend, and coworker agents run inside Slack and Teams with long-term memory.

Since launching in February, Mintive says it has signed more than 50 paying customers, including Ro, Modern Treasury, Braze, Coursera, the University of Michigan, Apax and Stability AI. It processes more than 2.5 million agent calls a day and has handled over 200 million in seven months. The SaaS News reported that the company plans to use the funding to build out its platform for deploying secure, governed agents.

"Mintive offers the critical, scalable, trusted third party scaffolding businesses need - to deliver agent identity, permissions and tracing, regardless of the underlying models," said Aileen Lee, founder and managing partner of Cowboy Ventures.

Why It Matters

Enterprises are moving agents from pilots into production, and the gating questions are increasingly about control: who an agent is, what it can touch and what it costs. Lee framed governance, oversight, identity management and security as the major factors holding back enterprise AI adoption.

The field is crowded. TechCrunch noted competition from Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic, point-product vendors such as LangChain, New Relic and Rippling, and more than 40 Y Combinator startups. Mintive's bet is that a model-agnostic, third-party layer wins when companies run agents across several providers at once.

The modest round size is deliberate. Lee told TechCrunch that Ngiam was not chasing a vanity round, arguing that many companies are set up to fail by chasing large rounds rather than raising what they need to make real progress. With 50-plus paying customers in its first months, Mintive is trying to prove the category on revenue before scale capital.

Source

TechCrunch — Agent identity startup Mintive lands Cowboy Ventures, Coatue, angels Jeff Dean, Andrej Karpathy