Agent identity startup Mintive raises a $7 million seed round

Mintive is a startup that manages AI agents in a company. Mintive announced a $7 million seed round, a type of funding for a new company. Cowboy Ventures led it. Mintive has $11 million in all. Coatue and the angel investors Jeff Dean and Andrej Karpathy also took part. Mintive says that 50 enterprise customers use it since its launch in February.

How it works

The platform has 3 parts:

• An MCP gateway sets which cloud services agents can use and which tasks they can do there.
• A model gateway sends work to different AI models and can keep costs low.
• An agent monitor tracks all agents in the company.

It also gives each agent an identity that can be different from the employee it serves.

The proof

Mintive names Ro, Coursera and University of Michigan as customers. The chief executive says that set-up is some clicks. It gave no test results and no numbers for use.

What is not known

The field is crowded. Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic offer agent management, and more than 40 Y Combinator startups work on it. Mintive gave no sign that it can win against them.

Insight: Agent control may be the next paid layer

Anthropic, OpenAI and Alibaba gave agent tools to a neutral foundation. Socure sells a tool that connects agents to a known owner. This seems to be a race for the control point, because the open connection is free. Select a tool that works with open standards, to change it with less work.