Mintive Raises $7 Million to Give Businesses More Control Over AI Agents
Backed by Cowboy Ventures, Coatue, and prominent AI researchers, the startup is developing identity, permission, and monitoring tools for organizations deploying autonomous software agents.
Technology news
Enterprise AI infrastructure startup Mintive has announced a $7 million seed round led by Cowboy Ventures, bringing its total funding to $11 million. Additional backing includes Coatue, Operator Collective, Hustle Fund, and individual investors with significant experience in artificial intelligence and enterprise software. Among those named in the October 29 report are Discovery Loop co-founder and former Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, and Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest.
Mintive was founded by Jiquan Ngiam and Vijay Vasudevan, both of whom have backgrounds in large-scale AI development. Ngiam previously worked at Google Brain and was an early engineer at Coursera. Vasudevan was a co-creator of TensorFlow during his time at Google Brain. Their new company focuses on a problem that becomes increasingly important as businesses deploy autonomous agents: how to identify, authorize, observe, and manage software that can act on behalf of people.
The startup's platform includes an MCP gateway intended to control which services AI agents can access and what operations they can perform. It also offers a gateway for routing requests to language models and controlling associated costs, alongside agent identity management and monitoring features. These components are designed to give IT teams a centralized view of agent activity rather than leaving every automated workflow to manage permissions and integrations independently.
Mintive also supports agents that run longer tasks proactively, extending the governance challenge beyond simple user-triggered requests. The company says its product has attracted more than 50 enterprise customers since launching in February 2026. Reported customers include Ro, Modern Treasury, the University of Michigan, Coursera, Apax, and Stability AI. Mintive emphasizes simplified setup, although deployment speed and effectiveness have not been independently benchmarked in the reporting.
The investment arrives as major software providers and startups compete to establish standards for enterprise agent management. Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI, Anthropic, and numerous infrastructure vendors are addressing parts of the same market. Mintive's opportunity is to provide a management layer that works across multiple systems while reducing the operational burden of agent security. Its challenge will be proving that the promised simplicity does not come at the expense of the visibility, permission boundaries, and reliability organizations require.