Agent identity startup Mintive lands Cowboy Ventures, Coatue, angels Jeff Dean, Andrej Karpathy
The fact that Jeff Dean and Andrej Karpathy are writing personal checks is the loudest part of this story. Those are two of the most respected engineering minds in AI, and they don't attach their names to just anything. When the smartest builders in the room are paying attention to identity and access for agents, you know the agent hype cycle is maturing into something real. We're past the phase of demoing chatbots; now we're in the unglamorous phase of figuring out permissions.
Mintive's pitch is that IT teams are about to drown in agents that need credentials, scopes, and audit trails. If every employee can spin up an agent that reads your CRM or drafts emails, you need a control plane that isn't just a spreadsheet. The founders have the pedigree to go deep here, and the problem is undeniably real.
I'd want to know more about how they handle the actual enforcement layer, and whether they're building on top of existing identity providers or ripping them out. The space is getting crowded, but if anyone can cut through the noise, it might be the folks who saw this coming from the Google Brain days. The real test will be whether IT managers actually adopt it or just keep bolting on new rules to old systems.