As AI agents start doing real work inside companies, IT teams are asking a basic question: who is this agent, and what is it allowed to touch? Mintive wants to answer that, and it has some famous backers.
The startup has raised $11 million in total, including a newly announced $7 million seed round led by Cowboy Ventures, TechCrunch reports. Coatue, Operator Collective and Hustle Fund also invested. Angels include Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest, former Google chief scientist Jeff Dean and OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy.
The founders
CEO Jiquan Ngiam was Coursera’s founding engineer and later worked on neural networks at Google Brain. CTO Vijay Vasudevan is one of the co-creators of TensorFlow.
What the product does
Mintive’s platform includes an MCP gateway that lets IT teams decide which cloud services agents can reach and what actions they can take. It also has an LLM gateway that routes across models and can cap costs, identity and authorization for agents that may differ from the employees they serve, and a monitor that tracks every agent in the company. Customers can also build agents that run long tasks proactively.
Ngiam says ease of setup is the differentiator. “We have really thought through all the ways this can be done, all the access control, permissioning layer, to make it so easy for them to deploy it, that all the complexities are hidden away,” he told TechCrunch.
Since launching in February, Mintive says it has signed more than 50 enterprise customers, including Ro, Modern Treasury, the University of Michigan, Coursera, Apax and Stability AI.
A crowded field
The competition is intense. TechCrunch notes Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic all offer agent management, along with point products from companies like LangChain, New Relic and Rippling, and more than 40 Y Combinator startups. Cowboy Ventures’ Aileen Lee said she liked that Ngiam raised a modest amount instead of chasing a “vanity” round.
Why it matters
Agent governance is becoming its own budget line. Security, identity and IT teams will be evaluating tools like this over the next year, and many will be making first-time purchases in the category.
For identity, security and AI platform vendors, that means buyers are still forming opinions. Clear messaging on access control, cost caps and visibility, delivered to the right CISOs and IT leaders, is how newer players earn a place on the shortlist.
Sources: TechCrunch. Written by the xRapid Media LLP team.
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