Agent Identity Startup Mintive Raises $7M Seed with Backing from Jeff Dean and Andrej Karpathy

Mintive, an AI agent identity management startup, announced it has raised a $7 million seed round, bringing its total funding to $11 million. The round was led by Cowboy Ventures, with participation from Coatue, Operator Collective, and Hustle Fund. Notably, Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest, former Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, and OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy joined as individual angel investors.

The company was founded by Jiquan Ngiam and Vijay Vasudevan. Ngiam was the founding engineer at Coursera and previously worked on neural networks at Google Brain; Vasudevan is best known as one of the co-creators of TensorFlow while at Google Brain. Mintive's platform helps enterprise IT departments govern and provision AI agents, offering features like an MCP gateway, LLM routing, and agent monitoring. Despite intense competition from tech giants and numerous startups, Mintive emphasizes ease of deployment and reports having secured 50 enterprise customers since launching in February.

Aileen Lee, managing partner at Cowboy Ventures, stated she respects Ngiam's caution in raising only $11 million, contrasting this approach with other agentic-building startups that are chasing unicorn valuations and massive capital rounds.