Mintive, a startup that manages the identities and permissions of AI agents inside companies, has raised a $7 million seed round led by Cowboy Ventures, TechCrunch’s Julie Bort reported on Oct. 29. The company says it has raised $11 million in total.
Coatue, Operator Collective and Hustle Fund also invested, according to TechCrunch. Its angel investors include Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest, former Google chief scientist Jeff Dean and OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, among others.
The company used to be called MintMCP. In a post announcing the new name, it said it launched early in 2026 as an MCP gateway and has since added more products. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is a standard way for AI agents to call outside tools, and a gateway is a checkpoint that all of those calls pass through.
What it sells
Mintive’s pitch is that each agent should be treated like an employee. “It gets its own identity, only the access its work requires, and a record of what it did,” the company says on its About page. It argues that an agent borrowing a person’s login token inherits all of that person’s permissions, which is usually far more than one task needs.
The product has several parts, according to TechCrunch and Mintive’s site.
The MCP gateway lets IT staff approve which tool servers employees can use and switch off destructive actions. An LLM gateway routes calls to different AI models and can cap spending by team. An agent monitor ties every call back to a person, agent, server and model.
The company also offers agents that work inside Slack and Teams on long-running tasks.
Mintive says the controls work with Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot and Cursor, among others.
The founders come from Google Brain. CEO Jiquan Ngiam was Coursera’s first employee and later worked on neural networks at Google Brain, TechCrunch reported. CTO Vijay Vasudevan helped create TensorFlow, Google’s machine learning framework, while at Google Brain.
Ngiam told TechCrunch the main selling point is how fast the product sets up. “You don’t think about sandboxes, you don’t think about harnesses, you don’t think about memory because we manage that for you,” he said.
Mintive says more than 50 enterprise customers have signed on since it launched its product in February. TechCrunch listed Ro, Modern Treasury, the University of Michigan, Coursera, Apax and Stability AI. On its own site, Mintive says those customers run 2.5 million agent calls a day through its system, a figure that comes from the company.
A crowded market
Bort called it “hard to imagine a field with more competition.” Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic all offer agent management tools, she wrote, alongside point products from companies such as LangChain and New Relic, and more than 40 startups from Y Combinator alone.
Cowboy Ventures managing partner Aileen Lee said she backed the company for its founders and for the modest size of the round. Bort contrasted it with Prime Intellect, which raised a $130 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation.
“He is a grown-up and so he was not a person chasing a ‘vanity’ round,” Lee told TechCrunch of Ngiam. “We’re just kind of doing it the brick by brick, old-fashioned way.”
Source: TechCrunch, Julie Bort, “Agent identity startup Mintive lands Cowboy Ventures, Coatue, angels Jeff Dean, Andrej Karpathy”
Additional sources: Mintive, “About Mintive”; MintMCP blog, Mintive, “Meet Mintive”
