NanoClaw Creator Rejects 20 M B u y o u t , R a i s e s 20MBuyout,Raises12M Seed Round Led by Valle

NanoClaw Creator Rejects $20MillionBuyout,Secures$12 Million Seed Round Instead

NanoCo, the company behind the SECurity-focused NanoClaw—an alternative to openclaw—has closed an oversubscribed $12 million seed round following a viral launch, the founders told TechCrunch.

The funding round was led by Valley Capital Partners, with participation from Docker, Vercel, Monday.com, Slow Ventures, and angel investors including Clem Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face.

NanoClaw creator Gavriel Cohen sAId that within a matter of weeks, he went from coding the project on his couch to receiving viral endorsements from AI researcher Andrej Karpathy and Singapore’s foreign minister. He also fielded inbound interest from dozens of investors and even a roughly $20 million acquisition offer, which he and his brother and co-founder, Lazer Cohen, deCLIned.

“It was under six weeks from committing the first lines of code to a term sheet,” Gavriel told TechCrunch.

“There was a lot of inbound and interest,” he added. “People reaching out in DMs on X and sending emails.” He estimated that about 50 or more founders and tech executives sent direct messages asking to invest.

One of them was Delangue, who sent a note saying, “I like what you’re doing with NanoClaw.” Gavriel responded in kind, telling the Hugging Face CEO that he admired the company’s tiny robot, Reachy Mini, and hoped to run NanoClaw on it one day.

The two programmers then began talking shop, and Gavriel eventually asked Delangue if he was interested in angel investing and secured a yes.

As it turns out, an ACTive member of NanoClaw’s open-source community is already working on running it on Reachy Mini, Gavriel noted.

As previously reported, interest in NanoClaw skyrocketed after Andrej Karpathy tweeted his praise for it. But the project truly began to snowball after Singapore’s foreign minister called NanoClaw his “second brain” in a Facebook post that went viral.

NanoClaw was created as a secure alternative to OpenClaw to assist the Cohen brothers with their previous startup, an AI marketing firm that used Agents to do much of the work. Instead of running directly on a computer with access to all services and credentials, NanoClaw runs sandboxed in a container—a practice that is becoming a common solution for running more secure, OpenClaw-like setups.

Just a couple of months ago, however, the idea was novel and took on a life of its own. Seeing the surge in interest, the Cohen brothers began talking to investors and other founders, seeking advice. Should they turn this free project into a company? And if so, how?

One VC offered to buy the project on the spot for one of his portfolio companies, putting forward a “six-digit” dollar amount, Gavriel said.

While weighing that offer, the Cohen brothers met a founder friend who gave them a key insight: open-source projects grow exponentially more valuable as their community expands. These users not only help contribute code to mature the project quickly, but they also discover and dEMOnstrate a wide range of uses.

The friend told the Cohen brothers that if they believed NanoClaw could be that kind of project, they would need to quit their other venture and commit to it fully.

“He was right,” Gavriel said. Shortly after they shuttered the other business and focused, the viral posts ARRived, and their new outfit secured partnerships with docker and Vercel.

About two weeks after that first offer, they received another, this one for around $20 million, including jobs for them to stay and run the company. The brothers declined that one as well.

“Since then, it’s only escalated. We have many thousands of people using NanoClaw,” Gavriel said.

NanoCo has now begun signing enterprise customers, an idea that originated from its community. The product’s early adopters have been technically Skilled indiViduals, many of whom are executives at Big Tech companies. After setting up their own NanoClaw instances, these users kept getting APProached by Coworkers asking for help doing the Same.

These colleagues don’t want to become NanoClaw IT support, Gavriel explained, but NanoCo does. The company is therefore offering implementation services—now commonly known as “forward-deployed engineers”—to help businesses roll out NanoClaw AI Agents to employees and provide ongoing support.

While NanoCo declined to disclose the names of its early enterprise customers, the brothers say that executives at companies including Amazon, Gap, Google, Meta, SentinelOne, and Accenture are using NanoClaw.