Mintive raises $11M for agent identity, Jeff Dean and Karpathy as angels

Mintive raised $11 million for an agent identity platform, TechCrunch reports. Cowboy Ventures led the $7 million seed round. Coatue, Operator Collective and Hustle Fund also took part.

The angel investors are the hook. Frederic Kerrest, Okta co-founder, joined. So did Jeff Dean, Google's former chief scientist. Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI co-founder, also took part.

The founders built this at Google Brain

Jiquan Ngiam is the chief executive. He was Coursera's first engineer. He worked on neural networks at Google Brain. Vijay Vasudevan is the chief technology officer. He co-created TensorFlow at Google Brain.

The product has four parts, TechCrunch reports. An MCP gateway handles authorization. An LLM gateway routes model calls and caps costs. There is an agent identity and permissions layer. There is also agent monitoring. The pitch is one place to say who the agent is, what it can touch and who approved it.

Early traction, named by customer

Mintive launched in February 2026. It now has more than 50 enterprise customers, TechCrunch reports. Named ones include Ro, Modern Treasury, University of Michigan, Coursera, Apax and Stability AI. TechCrunch does not name a use case for any of them. It does not give revenue, seat count or price.

Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures gave the pitch for the thesis. In her words: AI will power incredible things, but we need more infrastructure. That infrastructure must give governance, visibility and control, she said.

Ngiam, asked what customers like, said deployment speed. He described it as "how quick it is and easy to deploy." He said the team thought through every path. That includes access control and the permissioning layer. The aim is to hide the complexity, he said. TechCrunch gives no number against that claim.

The crowded brief

TechCrunch names a long list of other companies on the same ground. Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and LangChain all build parts of this. New Relic and Rippling do adjacent work. More than forty Y Combinator companies are chasing agent identity. Prime Intellect is cited as a competitor that has raised much more.

Okta, where Mintive's angel Kerrest spent most of a career, already runs identity for people. The open question is simple. Is agent identity its own product? Or is it a feature that your existing identity vendor will add soon?

What a buyer learns from this round

A security lead running AI agents now has a priced vendor to compare its own plan against. The $7 million seed is small. The real signal is the customer list and the investor list. Measure the inside-vendor option first. Does Okta cover this? Does your model provider's router cover it? Does the MCP gateway in your stack already do most of it?

Source

Agent identity startup Mintive lands Cowboy Ventures, Coatue, angels Jeff Dean, Andrej Karpathy, TechCrunch.