Mintive Raises a $7 Million Seed Led by Cowboy Ventures to Gate What Company AI Agents Can Touch

Mintive, the agent-management company formerly called MintMCP, has raised a $7 million seed round led by Cowboy Ventures, TechCrunch reported on October 29. Coatue, Operator Collective and Hustle Fund also invested. The valuation was not disclosed.

The round brings Mintive's total to $11 million, so $7 million is 64% of everything it has raised and the earlier $4 million is the remainder by subtraction.

What it sells

Per TechCrunch, Mintive is a platform for managing AI agents inside a company. The pieces are an MCP gateway that controls which cloud services an agent can reach and what it can do there, an LLM gateway that routes requests between models and can cap spending, agent identities with permissions that can differ from those of the employee the agent serves, and a monitor that tracks every agent in the company.

The company's own rename post, dated October 12 and bylined to Jiquan Ngiam, lists the line-up as MCP Gateway, LLM Gateway, Mint Guard, Agent Monitoring and Coworker Agents. MintMCP launched in early 2026 as the gateway alone and added the rest since, the post says. The rename arrived 17 days before the funding news.

The customer list does not match

TechCrunch says the product has more than 50 enterprise customers, and names Ro, Modern Treasury, the University of Michigan, Coursera, Apax and Stability AI. The company's blog names Coursera, Deerfield Group, Workstream, Modern Treasury and Bared Footwear.

Customer	TechCrunch	Mintive blog
Coursera	Named	Named
Modern Treasury	Named	Named
Ro, Apax, Stability AI, University of Michigan	Named	Not named
Deerfield Group, Workstream, Bared Footwear	Not named	Named

Two names overlap out of ten. The lists are samples and not contradictions, but the blog gives no total, so the 50 figure rests on one outlet's account of what the company said. The blog also quotes an unnamed Deerfield Group chief technology officer calling the rollout the fastest seen, a claim the post does not tie to a named person.

Founders, angels and the crowded field

TechCrunch lists Jiquan Ngiam as chief executive, previously Coursera's founding engineer and later a neural-network researcher at Google Brain. Vijay Vasudevan is chief technology officer, described as a co-creator of TensorFlow at Google Brain.

The angels include Frederic Kerrest, an Okta co-founder, Jeff Dean and Andrej Karpathy, according to TechCrunch. The amounts they put in are not given.

The competition is large. TechCrunch names Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic as platform rivals, LangChain, New Relic and Rippling as point-product rivals, and counts more than 40 startups from Y Combinator alone. That last figure is the sharpest reading of the market, since 40 entrants means buyers can compare. A recent example is Alter, a Y Combinator S25 company that launched a proxy for the same problem of agents sharing one key. On the funding side, Daytona's $60 million Series B shows where larger agent-infrastructure cheques have gone.

What to watch

A seed round without a disclosed valuation leaves the ownership question open until a Form D or a later priced round. The next observable milestone is Mintive's next raise and whether the customer count it gives then is a total or a sample.