Mintive, an early-stage startup building identity and governance infrastructure for enterprise AI agents, has raised $11 million total, including a newly announced $7 million seed round led by Cowboy Ventures.
Coatue, Operator Collective and Hustle Fund also joined the round, alongside angel investors including Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest, Discovery Loop co-founder and former Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, and OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy.
Mintive's platform centres on an MCP gateway that lets IT teams control what cloud services and actions AI agents can access, alongside an LLM gateway for routing between models and capping costs, an agent identity and monitoring layer, and tools for deploying agents that run long tasks autonomously.
The company launched its product in February and has since signed more than 50 enterprise customers, including Ro, Modern Treasury, the University of Michigan, Coursera, Apax and Stability AI.
Mintive was founded by CEO Jiquan Ngiam, Coursera's first employee and later a Google Brain researcher, and CTO Vijay Vasudevan, one of the creators of TensorFlow at Google Brain.
The startup enters a market already served by Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic, plus point products from Langchain, New Relic and Rippling, and more than 40 Y Combinator-backed competitors.
Cowboy Ventures managing partner Aileen Lee said she was drawn to the founders' restraint on round size, contrasting Mintive with agentic-infrastructure peers such as Prime Intellect, which raised $130 million at a $1 billion valuation for its Series A.
"I think a lot of companies are being set up for failure by chasing round size, rather than, 'how much do I need to actually really move the needle for the company?'" Lee said.
