Cowboy Ventures

Every employee gets a login, a set of permissions, and a record of what they do. Most AI agents get none of that, even as companies put them to work inside CRMs, finance systems, and codebases. Jiquan Ngiam, Vijay Vasudevan, Bo Zhi See, and Phillip Bensaid have been building in AI for close to two decades, from co-creating TensorFlow at Google Brain to being a part of Coursera’s founding team. Now they’ve built Mintive to give agents the same controls people get. Mintive gives each agent its own identity and permissions. An agent can reach only the systems it needs, and every action it takes is logged. Security teams get the controls they’d expect for a new hire, so agents can move out of the sandbox and into real work. Enterprises are already using it at scale today. Mintive handles millions of agent calls a day for 50+ paying enterprise customers, including Braze, Ro, Coursera, Modern Treasury, and the University of Michigan. Today Mintive announced $11M in total funding, including a new $7M round led by us at Cowboy Ventures. We’re excited to partner with JQ, Vijay, Bo, Phillip, and the Mintive team! TechCrunch link in the comments 👇 Aileen Lee Rohan Puranik Caroline Duffy Jonathan Nirenberg Shimali P. Ryan Stroub

In collaboration with CoreWeave, we show how our autonomous system optimizes LLM inference end to end, from engine configuration to custom GPU kernels: up to 63% more traffic for GLM-5.3, 2x per-user throughput for Qwen3.8-27B, and 10% higher coding-agent throughput for DeepSeek V4.1 Flash. https://lnkd.in/dbZzA2dC

🎉🎉 We're thrilled to share that our founder and Managing Partner, Aileen Lee has been named to the Forbes Optimism 250 list of the country's 250 Greatest Living Optimists. Backing founders at the earliest stage takes a deep belief in what's possible, and Aileen has led with that belief for her entire career. Congratulations, Aileen, on a richly deserved honor!

Big congratulations to Maayan Salom, Or Avidov and the whole Elementary team on joining Boomi! We at Cowboy Ventures are so proud to be part of the Elementary journey. Maayan and Or took an open-source project and grew it into a product used by 1,500+ data teams, with 1.1M+ monthly downloads and a thriving community of around 4,000 members. That kind of adoption is earned through building something people truly rely on. Now, with Elementary's data observability and reliability capabilities joining the Boomi Enterprise Platform, even more enterprises will get the data quality and governance they need to run AI in production. Elementary raised from TLV Partners, Cowboy Ventures, Y Combinator, and angel investors. Thank you for letting us be along for the ride. Excited to see what's next! #Elementary #Boomi #DataObservability #AI #CowboyVentures

Today we're taking a big step forward with General Compute . General Compute is purchasing Positron AI Atlas systems and has committed to our next-generation Titan platform. Atlas will be available through General Compute beginning Q1 2027. For General Compute, that means a broader inference offering, combining GPUs and purpose-built accelerators under one roof. For Positron, it means expanding our cloud footprint with a partnership spanning two generations of our technology. Excited to work with Jason Goodison Finn P. The opportunity is massive. As models get larger and AI becomes more interactive, memory capacity, bandwidth and inference economics matter more. Our memory-first architecture is designed for that shift. Serving multi trillion parameter models at very high interactivity is a shared goal for the two companies. This agreement gives both companies a path to scale: more inference options for General Compute's customers, and a broader route to market for Atlas and Titan. A big milestone for both teams, and a foundation for the next phase of growth.

We raised $12M for this moment. Today, we introduce CarbonAI: agentic AI for CRE finance. Our round was led by Cowboy Ventures and participation from Timber Grove Ventures, Bling Capital, and Max Ventures. What began as an idea, became a mission, and then a movement. Today, we are excited to unveil CarbonAI to the world and begin the latest chapter in our decade-long mission to transform CRE lending. Over the last few weeks I've written about why most AI tools fall short for CRE lenders, and what a solution has to deliver to actually work. In short, it has to be autonomous, auditable, native to workflow, self-improving and built by industry experts. This is the platform we have built at Carbon. Carbon's agents run the analytical work behind a CRE loan, from underwriting and due diligence to the investment memo and quarterly surveillance. This work is performed in the native work surfaces (models, memos, processes) that lenders already rely on every day. Every figure traces back to the page it came from. When something needs a human call, it goes to the lending team. After close, the same system keeps watching the loan, so trouble surfaces when it starts, not at the next quarterly report. And Carbon learns from every deal, every document, until it underwrites more and more like you. The timing matters. $900B in commercial mortgages mature this year, and lending teams aren't scaling to meet it. Lenders shouldn't have to choose between slower decisions and thinner reviews. For Josh Kaufman and me, this is the culmination of a long road. We spent years at Starwood Capital Group and Morgan Stanley doing this work by hand. We went on to build Nativ and learned firsthand what lenders will and won't adopt. We led the Lender business at Built, where we learned countless more about how lenders operate and how to build great technology products. Carbon is the tool we wish we'd had as analysts, grinding through deals, late at night. A few thank-yous: To our early customers, who trusted us with real deals before there was a launch to announce. Your feedback shaped every part of this product. To Caroline Duffy, Aileen Lee and the team at Cowboy Ventures, Jeff Safferman and Dan Fleischmann at Timber Grove Ventures, Benjamin Ling, Ash Panchang and the team at Bling Capital, Ryan Darnell and Matthew Weinberg at Max Ventures and many others for backing us before anyone knew what we had. To our advisors, for the hard questions and honest answers. To our relentless team, who built something that continues to make it all worth it and delivers over and over again for our lender customers. To our families for their support, patience and belief - Carbon wouldn’t be here without you. So what now? We get back to work. We can’t wait. Link to full press release in the comments.

Jeff Saul and Josh Kaufman spent years in CRE finance doing the analytical work by hand, then built software for lenders. Now they've built CarbonAI: long-horizon AI agents that take on the core analytical work of CRE lending, with a full audit trail back to the source documents. Today Carbon announced $12M in funding led by Cowboy Ventures, with participation from Timber Grove Ventures, Bling Capital, and Max Ventures. We're excited to partner with Jeff, Josh, and the team. Press Release: https://lnkd.in/gstBMUgp Axios Exclusive: https://lnkd.in/g6bQhXXi Carbon Website: https://carboncre.ai/