AI agent management startup Mintive raises $11 million in total funding
US startup Mintive, which builds a platform for managing the identity and access of enterprise AI agents, has raised $11 million overall. Its newly announced $7 million seed round was led by venture firm Cowboy Ventures.
Mintive, a startup building tools to manage AI agents used inside companies, has announced a $7 million seed round, bringing its total funding to $11 million. The round was led by venture firm Cowboy Ventures, with participation from Coatue, Operator Collective and Hustle Fund. Angel investors include Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest, former Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean and OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy.
The founders
Mintive was founded by Jiquan Ngiam and Vijay Vasudevan. Ngiam, the CEO, was the founding engineer and first employee of online learning platform Coursera, and later worked on neural networks at Google Brain. CTO Vasudevan is one of the co-creators of TensorFlow, an AI training platform, which he built while at Google Brain.
What the platform does
The product includes an MCP gateway, where IT staff set which cloud services agents may access and what actions they can take there. It also has an LLM gateway that routes requests to different models and can cap costs, and an agent monitor that tracks all agents across a company. The system manages agent identities and permissions, which may differ from those of the employees the agents serve. Enterprises can also build agents that carry out long-running tasks on their own.
Competition and customers
The market is crowded. Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic all offer agent management, as do specialized products from companies such as Langchain, New Relic and Rippling. More than 40 startups from Y Combinator alone are working on the idea.
Ngiam says Mintive's edge is ease of use: setup takes a few clicks, and complexities such as sandboxes and memory are handled on the company's side. Since launching its product in February, Mintive says it has won over 50 enterprise customers, including Ro, Modern Treasury, the University of Michigan, Coursera, Apax and Stability AI.
Cowboy Ventures managing partner Aileen Lee says she values Ngiam's restraint in raising only $11 million, while other agent-focused startups raise far larger sums. As an example, Prime Intellect raised $130 million in a Series A at a $1 billion valuation.
