Who invested in Mintive's seed round?
Mintive, a early-stage startup that manages AI agents for businesses, has raised $11 million in total, including a newly announced $7 million seed round led by Cowboy Ventures. The round drew a notable list of backers. Coatue, Operator Collective and Hustle Fund also invested, and angel investors include Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest, Jeff Dean, the former Google chief scientist who now co-founded Discovery Loop, and OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy.
Who founded Mintive?
Mintive was founded by Jiquan Ngiam and Vijay Vasudevan. Ngiam, the company’s CEO, was the founding engineer of Coursera, where he was employee No. 1 and was hired by Andrew Ng. He later worked on neural networks at Google Brain. Vasudevan, the CTO, is one of the co-creators of TensorFlow, which he helped build while at Google Brain. TensorFlow was an AI training platform that predated PyTorch.
The company is entering a field that is already packed. Mintive’s product is meant to govern, provision and manage identities for enterprise AI agents, and it competes with offerings from Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic. Dozens of point products also target the space, from companies such as LangChain, New Relic and Rippling. Y Combinator alone has more than 40 startups working on agent management.
What does Mintive's platform do?
Mintive’s platform bundles several tools. An MCP gateway lets IT staff decide which cloud services an agent can access and what actions it can take within them. An LLM gateway routes requests to different models and can cap costs. The system also handles agent identities and authorizations, which can differ from the identities of the employees the agents serve. An agent monitor tracks every agent across a company. Mintive also lets customers build agents that carry out long-running tasks on their own.
Ngiam says the founders’ years of building AI for enterprises shaped the product’s design, with ease of use as a priority. Setup, the company says, takes only a few clicks.
“I think what our customers look at and they are a bit shocked at, is how quick it is and easy to deploy,” Ngiam said. “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. You don’t think about sandboxes, you don’t think about harnesses, you don’t think about memory because we manage that for you.”
Mintive says that pitch has won more than 50 enterprise customers since the product launched in February. Named customers include Ro, Modern Treasury, the University of Michigan, Coursera, Apax and Stability AI.
The founders’ industry experience also helped persuade Cowboy Ventures. Aileen Lee, the firm’s managing partner, said the team’s background was a major factor in the decision.
“AI is going to be able to power incredible things, but we need more infrastructure that’s going to give us governance and visibility and control,” Lee said.
Lee also pointed to the size of the round. Ngiam raised a modest amount compared with other agent-building startups that have pulled in large sums at unicorn valuations. Prime Intellect, for example, raised $130 million for its Series A at a $1 billion valuation.
“I feel really lucky to have won the chance to work with him,” Lee said. “He is a grown-up and so he was not a person chasing a ‘vanity’ round.”
She added a broader critique of the funding climate. “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?’ And so, yes, in a time when people are raising unprecedented amounts of money, we’re just kind of doing it the brick by brick, old-fashioned way.”
This article was written with the assistance of AI.
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