Mintive Raises a $7M Seed Led by Cowboy Ventures to Govern Enterprise AI Agents
The startup from TensorFlow co-creator Vijay Vasudevan and Jiquan Ngiam has $11M in total funding, angels including Jeff Dean and Andrej Karpathy, and more than 50 enterprise customers.
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Mintive, a San Francisco startup that controls what enterprise AI agents can access and records what they do, has raised a $7 million seed round led by Cowboy Ventures, bringing its total funding to $11 million. The company announced the round on October 29, 2026, and says it has more than 50 paying enterprise customers.
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Who invested
Coatue, Operator Collective and Hustle Fund also invested, along with Burst Capital and Maven Ventures, according to the company's release. The angel list is unusually prominent for a seed round:
- Jeff Dean, former Google chief scientist and Discovery Loop co-founder
- Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI co-founder
- Frederic Kerrest, Okta co-founder
- Michael Grinich, WorkOS founder and CEO
- Scott Belsky, former Adobe chief product officer
Cowboy Ventures managing partner Aileen Lee told TechCrunch the founders' experience stood out, and that Ngiam raised only the capital the company needed rather than chasing a "vanity" round at a higher valuation.
The founders
CEO Jiquan Ngiam was Coursera's founding engineer, its first employee, hired by Andrew Ng. He later worked on neural networks at Google Brain. CTO Vijay Vasudevan is one of the co-creators of TensorFlow, which he worked on at Google Brain.
The company launched early in 2026 as MintMCP, an MCP gateway. It has since renamed itself Mintive as its product line grew.
What the product does
Mintive's pitch is to treat each AI agent like an employee, with its own identity and only the access its job requires. The platform includes:
- MCP gateway: lets IT decide which cloud services agents can reach and what actions they can take.
- LLM gateway: routes model calls across providers, tracks usage and can cap costs.
- Mint Guard: screens calls for prompt injection, exposed secrets and personal data.
- Agent monitoring: tracks agents across the company and ties each tool call to the person, agent, server and model involved.
- Coworker agents: agents that can carry out long-running tasks.
The company says the platform is SOC 2 Type II audited.
Traction
Mintive says it now handles 2.5 million agent calls a day and more than 200 million in seven months. Named customers include Ro, Modern Treasury, the University of Michigan, Coursera, Apax and Stability AI. These usage figures come from the company.
The market is crowded. TechCrunch notes that Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic all offer agent management, as do companies such as LangChain, New Relic and Rippling, plus more than 40 Y Combinator startups.
Why it matters
As agents move from pilots into production, security teams need to know which agent did what and with whose permissions. Mintive is betting that a neutral layer above every model and agent platform will beat controls built into each vendor's own tools.
The small raise stands out. TechCrunch contrasted it with Prime Intellect's $130 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation.
If you run AI agents at work, the checklist Mintive's pitch implies is worth using whatever vendor you choose. Give each agent its own identity, scope its access narrowly and keep an audit trail that links every action back to a person.
More coverage of AI agents in the enterprise is in our Artificial Intelligence hub.
How we reported this
We checked the round, the founders and the product against TechCrunch's report. We confirmed the usage figures, additional investors and security details through Mintive's Business Wire release, and the name change through Mintive's blog. Usage numbers are labeled as company figures.
Sources
- TechCrunch: Agent identity startup Mintive lands Cowboy Ventures, Coatue, angels Jeff Dean, Andrej Karpathy, Oct 29, 2026.
- Business Wire: Mintive Tops 2.5 Million Daily Agent Calls, Oct 29, 2026.
- Mintive: Meet Mintive, Oct 2026.
DailyMech used AI tools to help research and draft this article; it was fact-checked by our editors.