NanoCo, the company behind NanoClaw, a security-focused alternative to OpenClaw, has raised an oversubscribed $12 million seed round following a viral launch, founders tell TechCrunch.
The funding was led by Valley Capital Partners with participation from angels including Docker, Vercel, Monday.com, Slow Ventures, and Clem Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face.
NanoClaw creator Gabriel Cohen (pictured above, left) says that in a matter of weeks, the project went from coding on his couch to receiving viral support from Andrei Karpathy and Singapore’s foreign minister, inbound interest from dozens of investors, and even turning down an approximately $20 million acquisition offer that he and his brother and co-founder Razor Cohen (pictured above, right) made.
“It took less than six weeks from committing the first line of code to the term sheet,” Gabriel told TechCrunch.
“There was a lot of inbound and interest,” he added. “People are contacting us via DMs and sending emails on X.” He estimates that about 50 or more founders and tech executives have sent DMs seeking investment.
One of them was Delangue, who left a note saying, “I love what you’re doing with NanoClaw.” Gabriel kindly replied to Hugging Face’s CEO that he liked the company’s Reachy Mini robot and hoped to run NanoClaw on it someday.
The two programmers then started talking, and eventually Gabriel asked DeLang if he was interested in angel investing, and he got a yes.
After all, active members of NanoClaw’s open source community are already working on running it on Reachy Mini, Gabriel says.
As we previously reported, interest in NanoClaw spiked after AI researcher Andrej Karpathy tweeted praise for NanoClaw. But the project really started to snowball after Singapore’s foreign minister went viral in a Facebook post calling NanoClaw his “second brain.”
NanoClaw was created as a secure alternative to OpenClaw to support the Coen brothers’ previously launched AI marketing company. The company used agents to do much of its work. However, rather than running directly on your computer with access to all services and credentials, NanoClaw runs sandboxed inside a container. This is becoming a popular solution for running more secure OpenClaw-like setups.
But a few months ago, this idea was novel and took on a life of its own. Seeing the interest, the Coen brothers began talking to investors and other founders for advice. Should I turn this free project into a company? how?
Gabriel said a venture capitalist then offered one of his portfolio companies to buy the project, offering a “six-figure” sum.
While thinking about this, the Coen brothers met with a friend of the founder who gave them an important insight. That’s because as the community grows, the value of open source projects increases exponentially. These users can not only contribute code to quickly mature the project, but also discover and demonstrate different uses.
He told the Coen brothers that if they believed NanoClaw could be such a project, they needed to quit their other businesses and focus on it.
“He was right,” Gabriel said. Shortly after they shut down other businesses and focused, a viral post arrived and their new organization secured partnerships with Docker and Vercel.
About two weeks after the first offer, they got a second one. That’s about $20 million, which includes remaining with the company to run it. The brothers also refused.
“Since then, it’s only escalated. We have thousands of people using NanoClaw,” he said.
NanoCo is now accepting reservations for enterprise customers, an idea born from the community. Early adopters of the product are people with technical skills, many of whom are executives at large tech companies. After these users set up their own NanoClaw instances, they continued to receive attacks from colleagues asking for help in doing the same.
Gabriel explained that these people don’t want to become NanoClaw IT people, but NanoCo does. The company is now offering an implementation service, known as Forward Deployment Engineers, to help companies deploy the NanoClaw AI agent to their employees and provide ongoing support.
NanoCo did not reveal who its early enterprise customers were, but the brothers say executives at companies such as Amazon, Gap, Google, Meta, SentinelOne and Accenture are using NanoClaw.
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