Mintive raises $7M seed for agent identity, backed by Jeff Dean and Andrej Karpathy
What's the deal? Agent identity startup Mintive has raised a $7 million seed round led by Cowboy Ventures, bringing its total funding to $11 million. Coatue, Operator CollectiveDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and Hustle FundDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → also invested, alongside angels including Okta co-founder Frederic KerrestDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, former Google chief scientist Jeff DeanDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and OpenAI co-founder Andrej KarpathyDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →.
What's the endgame? Mintive — formerly MintMCP — treats each enterprise AI agent like an employee, giving it its own identity, least-privilege access, and an audit trail. Its platform includes an MCP gateway controlling which tools and cloud services agents can touch, an LLM gateway that routes between models and caps costs, and a monitor tracking agents company-wide.
Who's behind it? Chief executive officer Jiquan Ngiam was Coursera's founding engineer and later worked on neural networks at Google Brain. Chief technology officer Vijay Vasudevan co-created TensorFlow, Google's AI training platform that predated PyTorch.
Why now? Mintive launched its product in February and says it has signed more than 50 enterprise customers, including Ro, Modern Treasury, Coursera, the University of Michigan, and Stability AI, running 2.5 million agent calls a day.
Ngiam says the pitch is ease of use. "I think what our customers look at and they are a bit shocked at, is how quick it is and easy to deploy," he told TechCrunch. Set-up amounts to clicking a few buttons, the company promises.
What could go wrong? The field is crowded. Agent management tools come from Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic, plus point products from firms like Langchain, New Relic, and Rippling — and 40-plus Y Combinator startups alone. Differentiation and customer traction may matter more than the angel roster.
The signal: The round lands amid a rush into enterprise agent security and governance, with one tally citing more than $435 million across 12 financings from April to September 2026, including Neo's $100 million launch and Cymphony's $30 million raise. Cowboy Ventures managing partner Aileen Lee praised Ngiam's restraint in raising only $11 million while rivals chase unicorn valuations. "AI is going to be able to power incredible things, but we need more infrastructure that's going to give us governance and visibility and control," she said.
Read more: TechCrunch
Image credit: Generated with Gemini
