Here’s another early-stage, agent-management startup to watch because of the backgrounds of the founders and the sheer number of big names it has already attracted as investors: Mintive.

Mintive has raised $11 million total, including a newly announced $7 million seed led by Cowboy Ventures. Additional investors include Coatue, Operator Collective, Hustle Fund, and angels include Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest, Discovery Loop co-founder and former Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, and OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, among others.

Mintive was founded by Jiquan Ngiam (pictured above, far right) and Vijay Vasudevan (pictured above far left). Ngiam, Mintive’s CEO, was the founding engineer of Coursera (employee No. 1, hired by Andrew Ng). Ngiam later worked on neural networks at Google Brain. Vasudevan, the company’s CTO, is best known as one of the co-creators of TensorFlow while he was at Google Brain. That was the OG AI training platform that predated PyTorch.

Mintive is joining a crowded field of products that promise to govern, provision, and offer identity management to enterprise AI agents. Its platform includes an MCP gateway that allows IT professionals to authorize what the cloud services agents may access and what actions they can perform on them. It also offers an LLM gateway that routes to different models and can cap costs; handles agent identities and authorizations that may differ from the employees that they serve; and an agent monitor that tracks all agents across the company. The company also allows enterprises to create agents that proactively perform long-running tasks.

Still, it’s hard to imagine a field with more competition. Agent management systems are offered by Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, plus as point products galore (from companies as diverse as Langchain, New Relic, Rippling, to name a few). Then there are countless startups working on the idea (40+ from Y Combinator alone).

So, what’s Mintive’s secret sauce? Given the founders’ long history in building AI for enterprises, they have designed their system to be especially easy to use, Ngiam says. Set-up amounts to clicking a few buttons, the startup promises.

“I think what our customers look at and they are a bit shocked at, is how quick it is and easy to deploy,” Ngiam tells TechCrunch. “We have really thought through all the ways this can be done, all the access control, permissioning layer, to make it so easy for them to deploy it, that all the complexities are hidden away. You don’t think about sandboxes, you don’t think about harnesses, you don’t think about memory because we manage that for you.”That pitch has won over 50 enterprise customers so far, Mintive says, since the startup launched its product in February. These include Ro, Modern Treasury, the University of Michigan, Coursera, Apax, and Stability AI.

But it was the founders’ industry experience that won over Cowboy Ventures managing partner Aileen Lee.

“AI is going to be able to power incredible things, but we need more infrastructure that’s going to give us governance and visibility and control,” Lee told TechCrunch.

Lee also says she particularly respects that Ngiam has been careful by only raising $11 million. This compares to other agentic-building startups raising vast amounts at unicorn valuations. As just one example: Prime Intellect raised $130 million for its Series A at $1 billion valuation.

“I feel really lucky to have won the chance to work with him,” said Lee. “He is a grown-up and so he was not a person chasing a ‘vanity’ round.”

Lee added: “I think a lot of companies are being set up for failure by chasing round size, rather than, ‘how much do I need to actually really move the needle for the company?’ And so, yes, in a time when people are raising unprecedented amounts of money, we’re just kind of doing it the brick by brick, old-fashioned way.”