Agent identity startup Mintive lands Cowboy Ventures, Coatue, angels Jeff Dean, Andrej Karpathy — SkimNews
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- Mintive raised a $7 million seed round led by Cowboy Ventures, bringing total funding to $11 million; Coatue, Operator Collective, Hustle Fund and angels Frederic Kerrest, Jeff Dean and Andrej Karpathy also backed the company.
- Jiquan Ngiam founded Mintive with CTO Vijay Vasudevan; Ngiam was Coursera’s founding engineer and later worked on neural networks at Google Brain, while Vasudevan co-created TensorFlow there.
- Mintive offers an MCP gateway for controlling which cloud services agents can access and what actions they can take, an LLM gateway that routes models and caps costs, agent-specific identities and authorizations, monitoring, and proactive long-running tasks.
- Mintive says it has won more than 50 enterprise customers since launching its product in February, including Ro, Modern Treasury, the University of Michigan, Coursera, Apax and Stability AI.
- Jiquan Ngiam says customers are surprised by how quickly Mintive deploys, with setup reduced to a few clicks while sandboxes, harnesses and memory management are handled behind the interface.
- Mintive joined a crowded agent-management field that includes systems from Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic, point products from LangChain, New Relic and Rippling, and more than 40 Y Combinator startups.
- Aileen Lee said she particularly respected Ngiam raising only $11 million rather than chase a “vanity” round, contrasting that discipline with Prime Intellect’s $130 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation.
Why it matters: Cowboy Ventures’ Aileen Lee said she particularly respected Ngiam raising only $11 million rather than chase a “vanity” round, explicitly contrasting that discipline with Prime Intellect’s $130 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation. Mintive’s reported 50-plus enterprise customers make the smaller raise notable as it competes in a field with 40-plus Y Combinator startups.
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