Mintive raises $11M for agent identity management, led by Cowboy Ventures

Mintive, an early-stage startup building agent identity and management infrastructure for enterprises, has raised $11 million in total funding. The round includes a $7 million seed led by Cowboy Ventures and attracted high-profile investors, including Jeff Dean and Andrej Karpathy. The company’s platform addresses a growing need for secure and scalable AI agent deployment in enterprise environments.

Tarun Mottlia

Editor, Lazyfounder

Published Oct 30, 20263 min read

Mintive raises $11M for agent identity management, led by Cowboy Ventures — Image: Mintive via source

30 SEC SUMMARY

Mintive, an AI infrastructure startup, raises $11M total, including a $7M seed round led by Cowboy Ventures.
Founders Jiquan Ngiam and Vijay Vasudevan bring experience from Google Brain, Coursera, and TensorFlow.
The platform focuses on agent identity management, offering MCP and LLM gateways, and an agent monitor.
Over 50 enterprise customers, including Ro, Modern Treasury, and Stability AI, are using Mintive’s products.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

$7M seed round led by Cowboy Ventures, part of an $11M total funding raise.
Investors include Coatue, Operator Collective, Hustle Fund, and angels like Jeff Dean and Andrej Karpathy.
Mintive’s platform includes MCP and LLM gateways, plus an agent monitor for enterprise AI deployment.
Over 50 enterprise customers, including Ro, Modern Treasury, and Stability AI.

Funding and investor backing

Mintive has raised $11 million in total funding, with $7 million coming from a seed round led by Cowboy Ventures. Other investors include Coatue, Operator Collective, Hustle Fund, and individual angels such as Jeff Dean, co-founder of Discovery Loop and former Chief Scientist at Google, and Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI. Frederic Kerrest, co-founder of Okta, also participated in the round.

Aileen Lee, Managing Partner at Cowboy Ventures, highlighted the founders’ pragmatic approach to fundraising, noting their decision to raise only what was necessary to build the product.

Founders and platform capabilities

Mintive was founded by Jiquan Ngiam and Vijay Vasudevan, both of whom have deep experience in AI and enterprise technology. Ngiam, the CEO, was the founding engineer of Coursera and an early employee at Google Brain, where he worked on neural networks. Vasudevan, the CTO, co-created TensorFlow at Google Brain and later co-founded Discovery Loop.

The startup’s platform focuses on agent identity and management, a critical gap in enterprise AI adoption. Its key products include an MCP gateway for authorizing cloud service access, an LLM gateway that routes requests to different models while capping costs, and an agent monitor to track all agents across an organization. Unlike traditional identity management systems designed for employees, Mintive’s tools are built to handle AI agents performing long-running tasks.

Enterprise adoption and competition

Since launching in February, Mintive has onboarded over 50 enterprise customers, including Ro, Modern Treasury, the University of Michigan, Apax, and Stability AI. The startup competes in a crowded space that includes incumbents like Amazon, Microsoft, and Anthropic, as well as startups like Langchain, New Relic, Rippling, and Prime Intellect. Prime Intellect recently raised $130 million for its Series A, underscoring the scale of investment in this sector.

Ngiam has emphasized the importance of ease of use, aiming to minimize setup time for enterprises deploying AI agents.

What this means

Lazyfounder analysis — our interpretation, not reported fact.

Mintive’s funding and rapid customer adoption signal a growing recognition of the need for specialized infrastructure to manage AI agents in enterprise settings. Unlike generic identity management tools, Mintive’s focus on AI-specific challenges—such as cost control, security, and long-running task authorization—reflects the unique demands of this emerging category. For operators, this reinforces the importance of building or adopting tools that address AI’s distinct operational requirements, rather than retrofitting existing solutions.

Key takeaways

Early traction: Over 50 enterprises, including Stability AI and Modern Treasury, are using Mintive’s platform, validating demand for agent identity management.
Founder-market fit: The founders’ backgrounds at Google Brain, Coursera, and TensorFlow align closely with the technical and enterprise challenges Mintive is addressing.
Competitive pressures: The space is attracting significant capital, with competitors like Prime Intellect raising large rounds—indicating both opportunity and urgency for startups in this segment.
Product focus: Mintive’s emphasis on minimal setup time and cost control could appeal to enterprises wary of complex AI deployments.

Sources

TechCrunch · 2026-10-29
Agent identity startup Mintive lands Cowboy Ventures, Coatue, angels Jeff Dean, Andrej Karpathy

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