Mintive Raises $11 Million for Enterprise AI Agent Identity Platform
Mintive raises $11 million, including a $7 million Cowboy Ventures-led seed, to simplify identity, access, cost controls and monitoring for AI agents.
Summary
On October 29, 2026, agent identity startup Mintive announced a $7 million seed led by Cowboy Ventures, bringing total funding to $11 million. Coatue, Operator Collective and Hustle Fund joined, alongside Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest, Discovery Loop co-founder and former Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, and OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy. CEO Jiquan Ngiam was Coursera's founding engineer and employee No. 1, hired by Andrew Ng, then worked on neural networks at Google Brain. CTO Vijay Vasudevan co-created TensorFlow at Google Brain, the AI training platform that preceded PyTorch. Since launching its product in February, Mintive says it has more than 50 enterprise customers, including Ro, Modern Treasury, the University of Michigan, Coursera, Apax and Stability AI.
Mintive's MCP gateway lets IT teams control which cloud services agents access and which actions they perform. Its LLM gateway routes requests among models and caps costs; the platform also manages agent identities and authorizations, monitors agents companywide, and lets enterprises create proactive agents for long-running tasks. Ngiam says setup takes a few clicks because Mintive abstracts access controls, sandboxes, harnesses and memory. It competes with Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, LangChain, New Relic, Rippling and more than 40 Y Combinator startups. Cowboy Ventures managing partner Aileen Lee backed the founders' enterprise AI experience and the need for governance, visibility and control, while praising Ngiam for limiting the raise to $11 million. Prime Intellect, by comparison, raised a $130 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation. No use-of-proceeds or expansion timetable was provided.
Positives
- The $7 million Cowboy Ventures-led seed brings Mintive's total funding to $11 million.
- More than 50 enterprise customers have adopted Mintive since its product launched in February.
- Ro, Modern Treasury, Coursera, Apax, Stability AI and the University of Michigan are among Mintive's customers.
- Jiquan Ngiam and Vijay Vasudevan bring experience from Coursera, Google Brain and TensorFlow.
- Mintive combines agent identity, permissions, monitoring, model routing, cost controls and proactive task execution in one platform.
Risks & concerns
- Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and numerous point-product vendors already offer competing agent management systems.
- More than 40 Y Combinator startups alone are pursuing agent management opportunities.
- Prime Intellect's $130 million Series A substantially exceeds Mintive's total $11 million raised.
- Mintive identifies rapid deployment as its differentiator despite numerous rivals targeting the same governance functions.
- No use-of-proceeds or expansion timetable accompanied the funding announcement.