Agent Identity Startup Mintive Raises $11M Seed Round Backed by Cowboy Ventures, Coatue, and AI Luminaries
Mintive says its AI-agent governance platform has signed 50 enterprise customers since launching in February 2026, including Coursera, Stability AI and the University of Michigan. The startup has raised $11 million, including a $7 million seed led by Cowboy Ventures.
Mintive, an early-stage startup building identity and governance tools for enterprise AI agents, announced in October 2026 that it has raised $11 million in total funding, including a newly disclosed $7 million seed round led by Cowboy Ventures. Additional investors include Coatue, Operator Collective, and Hustle Fund. Angels backing the company include Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest, former Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, and OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy.
The company was founded by Jiquan Ngiam, CEO, and Vijay Vasudevan, CTO. Ngiam was the founding engineer at Coursera and later worked on neural networks at Google Brain. Vasudevan is known as one of the co-creators of TensorFlow, the AI training platform developed at Google Brain that predated PyTorch.
Mintive’s platform is designed to give IT teams control over enterprise AI agents. It includes an MCP gateway for authorizing which cloud services agents can access, an LLM gateway that routes to different models and caps costs, identity and authorization management for agents, and a monitoring tool that tracks agents across an organization. The company also enables enterprises to create agents that handle long-running tasks.
Since launching its product in February 2026, Mintive says it has signed 50 enterprise customers, including Ro, Modern Treasury, the University of Michigan, Coursera, Apax, and Stability AI. Ngiam attributes early traction to ease of deployment, saying the platform handles access control, permissions, sandboxing, and memory management so customers don’t have to.
The startup enters a crowded market that includes Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, and dozens of point-product competitors, as well as more than 40 Y Combinator-backed startups working on similar problems.
Cowboy Ventures managing partner Aileen Lee said she was drawn to both the founders’ backgrounds and Ngiam’s decision to raise only what the company needs. “A lot of companies are being set up for failure by chasing round size,” Lee told TechCrunch, contrasting Mintive’s approach with agentic startups raising at unicorn valuations — such as Prime Intellect, which raised $130 million at a $1 billion valuation for its Series A.