Mintive Raises $11M to Build Identity and Governance Infrastructure for AI Agents

Mintive, a startup developing identity management and governance infrastructure for enterprise AI agents, has raised $11 million in total funding, including a newly announced $7 million seed round led by Cowboy Ventures.

The round also includes participation from Coatue, Operator Collective and Hustle Fund. Angel investors include Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest, former Google Chief Scientist and Discovery Loop co-founder Jeff Dean, and OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy.

Founded by Jiquan Ngiam and Vijay Vasudevan, Mintive is building a platform that helps enterprises manage the identities, permissions, access and activities of AI agents operating across their organisations.

The company is entering a competitive market as major technology providers and startups develop tools to govern and manage enterprise AI agents. Mintive is positioning its platform around simplified deployment, centralised controls and visibility into agent activity.

Building identity infrastructure for enterprise AI agents

As companies introduce AI agents into business operations, managing what those agents can access and what actions they can perform is becoming an important infrastructure challenge.

Unlike conventional employee accounts, AI agents may operate independently, interact with multiple cloud services and carry out tasks on behalf of employees. Enterprises therefore need ways to assign identities, establish permissions and monitor agent activity.

Mintive aims to address these requirements through a platform that combines several capabilities.

Its Model Context Protocol (MCP) gateway allows IT teams to control which cloud services AI agents can access and what actions they are authorised to perform.

The platform also includes an LLM gateway that routes requests across different language models and allows enterprises to set cost limits. Its identity and authorisation layer manages agent permissions, which may differ from the access rights of the employees the agents serve.

Another component, an agent monitor, tracks AI agents operating across an organisation. Mintive also allows enterprises to create agents that proactively carry out long-running tasks.

Together, these capabilities are designed to give businesses a centralised way to manage AI agents rather than handling access, permissions and monitoring separately.

Founders bring experience from Google Brain and Coursera

Mintive was founded by Jiquan Ngiam and Vijay Vasudevan, both of whom have backgrounds in building AI infrastructure.

Ngiam, the company's CEO, was the founding engineer at Coursera, joining as its first employee after being hired by Andrew Ng. He later worked on neural networks at Google Brain.

Vasudevan, Mintive's CTO, is known for being one of the co-creators of TensorFlow during his time at Google Brain. TensorFlow became one of the widely used frameworks for training machine learning models.

Their experience in AI research and enterprise technology is central to Mintive's approach to agent management.

CEO Jiquan Ngiam says the company has focused on making the platform easy to deploy, with complex infrastructure requirements such as access controls, permissions, sandboxes, execution environments and memory management handled behind the scenes.

According to Ngiam, customers can set up the system through a relatively simple process rather than having to manage each of these components independently.

More than 50 enterprise customers since launch

Mintive says it has attracted more than 50 enterprise customers since launching its product in February 2026.

Its reported customers include Ro, Modern Treasury, the University of Michigan, Coursera, Apax and Stability AI.

The early customer base suggests demand from organisations looking for ways to introduce AI agents while maintaining control over their access to company systems and data.

For enterprise IT teams, the challenge is not limited to building agents. They also need to understand which agents are operating, what information they can access, which actions they can perform and how much their use costs.

Mintive is attempting to bring these requirements together in a single platform.

A competitive market for AI agent management

Mintive is entering a crowded category. Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic are among the major technology companies offering agent-management capabilities.

Specialised products are also emerging from companies such as LangChain, New Relic and Rippling, alongside numerous early-stage startups.

The competition makes differentiation important, particularly as enterprise customers evaluate security, governance, ease of deployment and integration with existing infrastructure.

Mintive's stated approach is to reduce the complexity involved in deploying and managing agents. Rather than requiring businesses to configure multiple infrastructure layers themselves, the company aims to make these controls accessible through a simpler setup process.

Cowboy Ventures managing partner Aileen Lee said the founders' industry experience was an important factor in the investment decision. She also highlighted the need for infrastructure that provides governance, visibility and control as AI adoption expands.

Funding and the focus on measured growth

The newly announced $7 million seed round brings Mintive's total funding to $11 million.

Cowboy Ventures led the seed round, with Coatue, Operator Collective and Hustle Fund also participating. Angel investors include Frederic Kerrest, Jeff Dean and Andrej Karpathy.

Lee also pointed to the company's relatively measured fundraising approach, contrasting it with other AI startups raising substantially larger rounds.

For Mintive, the immediate priorities include strengthening its agent-management infrastructure, serving its existing enterprise customers and competing in a market where established technology companies and new startups are building similar capabilities.

As businesses move from experimenting with AI agents to deploying them across operational workflows, identity management, permissions and monitoring could become increasingly important parts of enterprise AI infrastructure.

Mintive is betting that its combination of technical experience and simplified deployment can help it establish a position in that market.