Mintive has raised $7 million in a seed round led by Cowboy Ventures, taking its total funding to $11 million. The startup builds infrastructure that gives enterprise AI agents their own identities, permissions and audit trails, instead of letting them borrow the credentials of the employees they serve.
Mintive, formerly known as MintMCP, announced the funding alongside its public launch on October 29. New investors Operator Collective and Burst Capital joined the round, while Coatue, Hustle Fund and Maven Ventures also took part.
A crowded field for agent controls
Agent management is a crowded market, with large platform companies and many startups offering governance tools. Mintive argues that the missing piece is identity. An agent that borrows a person’s login inherits all of that person’s access, which makes it hard to trace what the agent did or to limit what it can do next.
The company’s answer is to treat each agent like an employee. Every agent gets its own scoped and revocable credential, with access delegated from the person it works for. That credential can be changed or revoked without touching the human account behind it.
Five products under one platform
Mintive sells five products that work together. Its MCP gateway governs tool access through approved servers, role based bundles and tool level switches. Its LLM gateway routes model calls through approved models, sets budgets by group and applies one policy across providers.
Agent Identity gives each agent its own credential and delegated permissions. Agent Monitor records the chain behind every action, including the person who started it, the agent that acted, the server it reached and the model involved.
Coworker agents work inside Slack and Teams, with long term memory and the same identities, permissions and audit trail as the gateways.
The platform is model agnostic, so the identities, permissions and audit trail stay the same whether a company uses Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, Cursor or its own agents. Mintive says its platform is SOC 2 Type II audited, with EU and US data residency.
Founders with deep enterprise AI roots
Mintive is led by chief executive Jiquan Ngiam and chief technology officer Vijay Vasudevan. Ngiam was the founding engineer of Coursera, where he was employee number one, and later worked on neural networks at Google Brain. Vasudevan is one of the co-creators of TensorFlow from his time at Google Brain.
Investor interest reflects those backgrounds. Angel investors include Frederic Kerrest, co-founder of Okta, Michael Grinich, founder and chief executive of WorkOS, Scott Belsky, former chief product officer at Adobe, Jeff Dean, co-founder of Discovery Loop and former chief scientist at Google, and Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI.
Cowboy Ventures managing partner Aileen Lee said the founders’ experience won her over. She also praised their restraint in raising only $11 million at a time when other agent infrastructure startups are raising far larger rounds.
AI is going to be able to power incredible things, but we need more infrastructure that is going to give us governance and visibility and control.
Aileen Lee, founder and managing partner at Cowboy Ventures
Early traction with large customers
Mintive says it has more than 50 paying customers since launching its product in February. Its customers include Ro, Modern Treasury, Braze, Coursera, the University of Michigan, Apax and Stability AI.
The company says it processes more than 2.5 million agent calls each day and has handled more than 200 million calls in seven months.
At Modern Treasury, a bank operations agent searches Sentry, Notion, Linear, the codebase and internal tools before a technical account manager steps in. Mintive says that deployment went live in under three weeks and saves technical account managers between 30 minutes and four hours per case.
At the University of Michigan, Mintive serves as the enterprise MCP gateway across 150,000 community members, giving students, faculty and staff one path to approved tools while central IT controls access in one place.
Ngiam said customers are often surprised by how fast the system is to deploy, because the company has worked through the access control and permissioning layers in advance.
I think what our customers look at and they are a bit shocked at, is how quick it is and easy to deploy.
Jiquan Ngiam, co-founder and chief executive at Mintive
The new funding will support Mintive’s push to become the control layer for companies that are moving agents from experiments into production, where every action needs an owner, a permission and a record.
