The key facts

  • Mintive has raised a total of $11 million, including a $7 million seed round led by Cowboy Ventures
  • Investors include Coatue as well as angels Jeff Dean and Andrej Karpathy
  • The founders are Jiquan Ngiam (Coursera's first employee) and Vijay Vasudevan (co-creator of TensorFlow)

Seed round and investors

Mintive, a startup building a platform for managing enterprise AI agents, has raised a total of $11 million, including a recently announced $7 million seed round led by Cowboy Ventures. The round also included Coatue, Operator Collective and Hustle Fund, with angels such as Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest, former Google chief scientist Jeff Dean and OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, TechCrunch reports.

Founders

The company was founded by Jiquan Ngiam (CEO) and Vijay Vasudevan (CTO). Ngiam was Coursera's first engineer, hired by Andrew Ng, and later worked on neural networks at Google Brain. Vasudevan is known as one of the creators of TensorFlow at Google Brain — the AI training platform that preceded PyTorch.

Product and customers

The Mintive platform includes an MCP gateway that lets IT teams define which cloud services agents can access and what actions they can perform; an LLM gateway for routing to different models with spending limits; identity management and authorization for agents, whose permissions may differ from those of the employees they serve; and a monitor for all of a company's agents. Since the product launched in February, the startup says it has attracted more than 50 enterprise customers, including Ro, Modern Treasury, the University of Michigan, Coursera, Apax and Stability AI.

Competition and positioning

The AI agent management market is highly competitive: similar systems are offered by Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic, along with numerous point products — from Langchain and New Relic to Rippling; more than 40 startups working on this are in Y Combinator alone. Ngiam claims Mintive's advantage is ease of deployment: setup comes down to a few button clicks, while access and permission complexities are hidden from the customer.

A cautious approach to funding

Cowboy Ventures managing partner Aileen Lee said she was convinced by the founders' experience and singled out Ngiam for his restraint: Mintive limited itself to $11 million, whereas other startups in this space are raising large sums at high valuations — for example, Prime Intellect raised $130 million in a Series A at a $1 billion valuation. 'Many companies doom themselves to failure by chasing round size rather than what they actually need to move the company forward,' Lee said.