Mintive, a startup that manages identities and permissions for enterprise AI agents, has raised a $7 million seed round led by Cowboy Ventures, bringing its total funding to $11 million.
Coatue, Operator Collective and Hustle Fund also invested. Angel investors include Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest, former Google chief scientist Jeff Dean and OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy.
Mintive’s platform is built to govern AI agents inside companies. It includes a gateway for the Model Context Protocol, or MCP, the standard that connects AI agents to outside tools and data. Through that gateway, IT teams can authorize which cloud services agents may access and what actions they can perform there, a layer where identity verification providers have also added access controls.
The platform also includes a gateway that routes requests to different large language models and can cap costs, and it handles agent identities and authorizations that may differ from those of the employees the agents serve. An agent monitor tracks all agents across a company, and enterprises can create agents that proactively perform long-running tasks.
The company was founded by chief executive Jiquan Ngiam and chief technology officer Vijay Vasudevan. Ngiam was the founding engineer at Coursera and later worked on neural networks at Google Brain. Vasudevan is one of the co-creators of TensorFlow, which he helped build at Google Brain.
Mintive says it has signed more than 50 enterprise customers since launching its product in February, including Ro, Modern Treasury, the University of Michigan, Coursera, Apax and Stability AI. The company says setup amounts to clicking a few buttons, and Ngiam said the product hides access control and permissioning complexity from customers.
“I think what our customers look at and they are a bit shocked at, is how quick it is and easy to deploy,” Ngiam told TechCrunch.
“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,” said Aileen Lee, managing partner at Cowboy Ventures. Lee said she respected that Ngiam raised only $11 million, calling him “a grown-up” who “was not a person chasing a ‘vanity’ round.”
Sources: TechCrunch
–
By the ID Tech Editorial Team
