AI infrastructure startup Mintive has raised $11 million in total funding, including a newly announced $7 million seed round led by Cowboy Ventures. Coatue, Operator Collective and Hustle Fund also invested, alongside angel backers including Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest, Google's Jeff Dean and OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy.
Founded by CEO Jiquan Ngiam and CTO Vijay Vasudevan, Mintive is building tools to help businesses manage AI agents. Ngiam was an early engineer at Coursera and later worked at Google Brain. Vasudevan helped create TensorFlow while at Google Brain.
The platform brings together gateways for controlling agents' access to cloud services, routing requests between language models and managing usage costs. It also provides agent identity and authorization controls, monitoring across an organization, and tools for building agents that can carry out longer-running tasks. Mintive says its design aims to make setup straightforward for enterprise teams.
Since launching its product in February, the startup says it has signed more than 50 enterprise customers, including Coursera, the University of Michigan, Ro, Modern Treasury, Apax and Stability AI. The market already includes established technology companies and a growing number of specialist startups.
As organizations adopt more AI agents, platforms that make their permissions and activity easier to oversee could become an important part of enterprise infrastructure.
