Enterprise AI agents are everywhere, and almost nobody can say what they are permitted to touch. Mintive, an early-stage startup, has pulled in $11M total, including a new $7M seed led by Cowboy Ventures, to answer that question.
Coatue, Operator Collective and Hustle Fund are also on the cap table. So are angels: Kerrest of Okta fame, Jeff Dean, once Google’s chief scientist, and Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI co-founder.
Two founders with deep AI plumbing
Chief executive Jiquan Ngiam was employee number one at Coursera, hired by Andrew Ng, before working on neural networks at Google Brain. Chief technology officer Vijay Vasudevan co-created TensorFlow at the same lab. Vasudevan’s work there predated PyTorch as an AI training platform.
The platform bundles an MCP gateway that lets IT teams authorize which cloud services agents reach and what actions they perform, an LLM gateway that routes between models and caps spend, distinct identities for agents that differ from the employees they serve, and monitoring across an organization. Setup, Ngiam says, is a few clicks, and customers are struck by how fast deployment goes because the access control and permissioning layers are handled for them.
A crowded field
Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic all sell agent management, and more than 40 Y Combinator startups are chasing the same problem. Mintive is leaning on ease of deployment and says it has signed 50 enterprise customers since launching in February, among them Ro, Modern Treasury, the University of Michigan, Coursera, Apax and Stability AI.
Cowboy Ventures managing partner Aileen Lee said the founders’ industry pedigree sealed the deal, arguing AI needs more infrastructure for governance, visibility and control.
