NanoClaw creators reject $20M buyout, raise $12M seed round in six weeks after viral launch

NanoClaw creator turns down $20M buyout offer, raises $12M seed instead | TechCrunch

NanoCo, the company behind security-focused OpenClaw alternative NanoClaw, has raised an oversubscribed $12 million seed round following a viral launch, its founders tell TechCrunch. The funding was led by Valley Capital Partners, and saw participation from Docker, Vercel, Monday.com, Slow Ventures and angels like Clem Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face. In a matter of weeks, NanoClaw creator Gavriel Cohen (pictured above, left) said he went from coding the project on his couch to receiving viral endorsements from Andrej Karpathy and Singapore's foreign minister, fielding inbound interest from dozens of investors, and even a roughly $20 million acquisition offer that he and his brother and co-founder, Lazer Cohen (pictured above, right), 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 DMs asking to invest. One of them was Delangue, who dropped a note: "I like what you're doing with NanoClaw." Gavriel then responded in kind, telling the Hugging Face CEO that he liked the company's tiny robot, Reachy Mini, and hoped to run NanoClaw on it one day. The two programmers then started talking shop, and Cohen 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 says. As we previously reported, interest in NanoClaw skyrocketed after AI researcher Andrej Karpathy tweeted his praise for it. But the project really began to snowball after the Foreign Minister of Singapore 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. But 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 to running more secure, OpenClaw-like setups. But a couple of months ago, the idea was novel and took on a life of its own. Seeing the interest, the Cohen brothers began talking to investors and other founders asking for advice. Should they turn this free project into a company? How? One VC offered to buy the project right then for one of his portfolio companies, offering a "six-digit" dollar amount, Cohen said. While contemplating that, they met a founder friend who gave them a key insight: Open-source projects grow exponentially more valuable as their community grows. Not only do these users help contribute code to mature the project quickly, but they discover and demonstrate various uses as well. He told the Cohen brothers that if they believed NanoClaw could be that kind of project, they would have to quit their other venture and commit to it. "He was right," Gavriel said. Shortly after they shuttered the other business and focused, the viral posts came, and their new outfit secured partnerships with Docker and Vercel. About two weeks after that first offer, they got another, this one for around $20 million, including jobs to stay and run their company. The brothers declined that one, too. "Since then, it's only escalated. We have many thousands of people using NanoClaw," he said. NanoCo has now started booking enterprise customers, an idea that came from its community. The product's early adopters have been people with technical skills, many of whom are executives at big tech companies. After these users set up their own NanoClaw instances, they kept getting hit up by coworkers asking for help to do the same. These folks don't want to become NanoClaw IT people, Cohen explained, but NanoCo does. So it is offering implementation services, these days known as "forward-deployed engineers," to help businesses roll out NanoClaw AI agents to employees and provide ongoing support. While NanoCo declined to specify who their early enterprise customers are, the brothers say that executives at companies like Amazon, Gap, Google, Meta, SentinelOne and Accenture are using NanoClaw itself.

NanoClaw's creators are turning the secure, open source AI agent harness into an enterprise 'second brain'

The creators of NanoClaw -- the hit open source, enterprise-friendly variant of autonomous AI agent harness OpenClaw -- are moving towards commercializing their technology for enterprises at scale, aiming to provide them with secure AI agents, and an ever-updating library of workplace context, for each human employee the enterprise has approved. The duo, including former Wix.com engineer Gavriel Cohen and his brother Lazer Cohen, also founder of tech public relations firm Concrete Media, shared with VentureBeat that their new startup, NanoCo AI, has received a $12 million oversubscribed seed round was led by Valley Capital Partners. The round features a roster of strategic backers that reads like an enterprise infrastructure all-star team, including Docker, Vercel, monday.com, Factorial Capital, and Hugging Face CEO and founder Clem Delangue. Buoyed by the seed round, NanoCo AI wants to move beyond basic automation to offer every enterprise worker a secure "professional assistant." Yet they are still committed to building out and maintaining NanoClaw as an MIT Licensed, enterprise-friendly, open source standard -- just offering specialized commercial managed services integration atop it. The new killer use case: an informed, ever-updating personal assistant for each human worker Gavriel, now CEO of NanoCo AI, sees this personalized approach as the ultimate unlock for the modern worker. "The killer use case is the the one to one we're calling it professional assistant," Cohen explained in a recent exclusive interview with VentureBeat. "If you can give someone an agent and make them twice, three times as effective, then you probably want more people as well, right?" He noted that as users forward emails, documents, and call notes to the agent, it systematically builds an "LLM wiki" -- similar to the "LLM Knowledge Base" concept articulated by influential AI researcher Andrej Karpathy -- effectively creating a dynamic knowledge graph of the user's specific job and projects. This persistent memory allows the agent to shift from simply answering questions to actively transforming information and executing first drafts that rival human output. Cohen emphasized that NanoClaw acts as a massive productivity multiplier rather than a headcount replacement. One-to-one secure 'lobster' AI NanoCo's core offering is a one-to-one professional AI assistant designed to shadow employees, draft contracts, review code, and manage accounts directly within tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams. Rather than a generic chatbot, the assistant learns the employee's role and adapts to their specific working style through ordinary conversation. How does NanoCo prevent this highly capable assistant from going rogue? By moving security away from fragile prompt engineering and embedding it directly into the infrastructure. Unlike its predecessor and inspiration, the even popular open source AI assistant OpenClaw -- which grew to a massive 400,000 lines of code -- NanoClaw's core logic was intentionally minimized to roughly 500 lines of TypeScript. This minimalism ensures the entire system can be audited by a human security team in about eight minutes. Furthermore, every NanoClaw agent operates within a strictly isolated environment. Leveraging a strategic partnership with Docker announced in March, NanoCo AI runs these agents inside MicroVM-based Docker Sandboxes. "In NanoClaw, the 'blast radius' of a potential prompt injection is strictly confined to the container and its specific communication channel," Cohen previously explained. To prevent unauthorized actions, raw API credentials never reach the agent itself. Instead, outbound requests pass through a secure OneCLI Rust Gateway that enforces company-defined policies. If an agent attempts a sensitive "write" action -- like modifying a cloud environment or deleting an email -- the gateway intercepts the request and pings the human user via a rich interactive card on Slack, Teams, or WhatsApp. Only when the user explicitly taps "Approve" does the system inject the credential. It is the architectural equivalent of a highly capable junior employee drafting an important corporate communication, but being physically unable to click "send" without the manager turning a literal launch key. Continued commitment to open source, MIT License Despite its new enterprise push, NanoCo AI is maintaining its commitment to its open-source foundation. The core NanoClaw framework remains available under the permissive MIT License, meaning independent developers and companies can continue to fork, modify, and run the system locally. In plain terms, the MIT License allows anyone to use the software commercially without paying NanoCo AI, provided they include the original copyright notice. NanoCo AI's monetization strategy instead focuses on the vast majority of enterprises that lack the specialized engineering resources to build, maintain, and scale internal agent platforms. While highly technical teams can choose to build their own infrastructure on top of the open-source code, NanoCo will sell managed, organization-wide deployments, taking on the burden of health checks, integrations, and ongoing security maintenance. Widespread global adoption The open-source adoption of NanoClaw has been staggering, crossing 250,000 downloads and nearing 29,000 GitHub stars since its debut. This ground-up momentum is entirely responsible for the surging enterprise demand. "Countless enterprise executives have told us the same thing," Cohen stated in the press release. "They're running NanoClaw personally, getting two and three times more done, and asking how to roll it out to their teams.". Perhaps the most high-profile validation came during the founders' recent trip to Singapore. The country's Foreign Minister, Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan, invited the NanoCo team to his office after publicly posting about his personal use of NanoClaw. Balakrishnan described the agent as "getting smarter over time," referred to it as his "second brain," and stated he wouldn't "dare switch it off". Cohen put the platform's security claims to the ultimate test during a live conference demonstration in Singapore. He invited a crowd of 300 people to chat simultaneously with his personal agent, which was actively connected to his real email and calendar. Thanks to NanoClaw's zero-trust gateway architecture, the agent safely rejected malicious attempts to access his inbox or delete existing events, while successfully allowing 12 attendees to book legitimate coffee chats. As AI shifts from a novelty tool that answers questions into a digital workforce that autonomously executes tasks, NanoCo AI is betting that verifiable security will be the defining metric of success. By combining a transparent open-source core with strict, infrastructure-level sandboxing, they aren't just selling an assistant; they are selling the peace of mind required for enterprises to actually use one.

Meet the brothers who turned a homegrown AI agent into a $12 million bet on the future of work -- in six weeks | Fortune

Lazer Cohen, 41, had spent 15 years building other people's companies. His younger brother Gavriel, 36, had spent a decade writing code. Together, they'd quietly bet on each other -- their parents included, having invested in the brothers' earlier AI marketing agency venture before NanoClaw existed. When Gavriel sat down on Jan. 29 and wrote the first line of code for NanoClaw, he wasn't thinking about fundraising. He was trying to solve a problem: the agentic tools available to him were powerful but dangerously insecure. So Gavriel, a former Wix developer with a physics and computer science background plus years of obsessive after-hours AI tinkering, built his own. Six weeks later, NanoCo had a term sheet. "We've just started rolling out professional assistants to businesses," Gavriel told Fortune. "We've had over 100 companies reach out to us. There's just more and more reaching out every single day." NanoCo's $12 million seed round -- led by Valley Capital Partners, with participation from Docker, Vercel, Monday.com, Slow Ventures, Clutch Capital and Factorial Cap, plus angel investments from Clem Delangue of HuggingFace, Matias Woloski of Auth0, and Vanja Josifovski, the former CTO of Airbnb -- makes NanoCo the first company in the rapidly growing "claw" space to close institutional funding. The round was oversubscribed. When Lazer told his longtime PR clients he was pivoting to build his own startup, the reaction surprised even him. "Any apprehension about what my move would mean for them was outweighed by their excitement," he said. Two immediately asked to invest. Four more former clients followed. They're all in the round. The Cohen brothers grew up together and, eventually, built businesses together -- though not always in the same direction. Lazer, the elder, built Concrete Media into a PR firm that helped launch over 100 startups. Gavriel spent a decade in engineering, leading a developer team at Wix before the AI wave pulled him toward something bigger. Lazer said that when Gavriel formally joined Concrete Media five years ago, their written partnership agreement explicitly anticipated future startups emerging from the collaboration. "It's one of those overnight successes that are 10 to 15 years in the making," he said. The pivot to NanoClaw came organically. "We set up an agent and it was managing our sales pipeline -- doing the work of an employee," Gavriel said. But the open-source tools available at the time were, in his telling, dangerously unguarded. He described OpenClaw, the viral agent framework NanoClaw was built to replace, as "this crazy kind of Frankenstein thing -- a wild experiment of how much value can you really get from AI agents?" The answer was quite a lot, but OpenClaw had put aside concerns about security, safety and software quality. Enter NanoClaw with, as the brothers described to Fortune, several guardrails. "There had been a lot of people sitting on the sidelines," Gavriel said -- developers and executives who understood OpenClaw was a leap forward but not safe enough for their purposes. "Then they were able to jump in and use NanoClaw and get that value." NanoClaw's core technical bet is deceptively simple: put the entire agent in a "sandbox." Most competing approaches -- including those taken by Anthropic and other major labs -- only put the agent's tools in a sandbox while leaving the agent itself in an open environment. Gavriel went the other direction, isolating the full agent so that everything it does enters and exits through a single controlled message pathway. The sandbox is like a little "universe," Gavriel explained. "It can do whatever it wants there. It can build." But when it starts to interact with the outside world and interact with sensitive things, he added, "that's where you start to put those blocks and those controls." In practice, that means credentials never reach the agent directly -- they're injected at runtime by a separate gateway. Sensitive actions, like sending an email or deleting a file, trigger human approval requests delivered as cards in Slack or WhatsApp: approve or reject, no AI involved in that layer, just old-fashioned software logic. Organizations set the outer policies; individual employees can tighten but never loosen them. Gavriel said he agreed with criticism from former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who recently described his fear of agents running "70,000 transactions" with no senior oversight -- contrasting it with his early days on a trading desk, where every transaction had a senior banker looking over his shoulder. Gavriel said he preferred the analogy of Tumblr for blogging, which essentially made WordPress very intuitive for people who didn't know what a weblog was. "It's a big debate within AI agent space: Do you put the agent in the sandbox or do you put the tools that the agent is trying to run the code in the sandbox and leave the agent outside?" He acknowledged there are many arguments for the side of putting the tools in the sandbox. He prefers the agent-in-the-box approach, he said, "because when I'm a security leader at a business, I'm a tech or R&D leader at a business, it's much easier to reason and think about and understand how this thing is being protected and blocked off and guarded ... it can't take actions without you approving." No single moment validated NanoClaw's approach quite like a Facebook post from Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan, Singapore's foreign minister -- one of the more technically sophisticated figures in global diplomacy, who maintains his own GitHub profile and has spoken publicly about AI at Singapore's AIE conference. He called NanoClaw his "second brain," and said it "answers every question, researches topics, provides daily updates, drafts speeches and condenses information. It has become invaluable -- I don't dare switch it off!" The team was invited to Singapore shortly afterward for a meeting with his AI innovation team, and Gavriel said he was surprised. "He's quite technical" and isn't prone to hype, Gavriel said, certainly not on Facebook. The endorsement joined a string of improbably early signs of traction: 30,000 GitHub stars since February, 250,000 open source downloads, formal partnerships with Docker and Vercel, and a roster of executives quietly using the tool personally and asking how to deploy it to their teams. The Docker partnership followed a similar pattern. Oleg Šelajev, a developer relations engineer at Docker, started using NanoClaw personally, then introduced it to his VP. A strategic investment and formal partnership followed. "It's people in these companies," Gavriel said. "Builders who look at it and say these ideas should be shared." The commercial product, NanoCo, takes what executives have been running on their own laptops and makes it deployable across an entire organization. The professional assistant -- accessible through Slack, Teams, or other existing tools -- does actual work: drafting contracts for legal teams, managing accounts for sales, reviewing code for developers. It learns each employee's role and style through ordinary conversation and builds what Gavriel calls a "Wikipedia of you" -- a persistent knowledge base that accumulates over weeks and months. Matt McConley, a senior product manager at Johnson Health Tech who has run NanoClaw across a team of six, puts the productivity claim in concrete terms. "My NanoClaw instance isn't working from memory -- it's reading actual data," he told Fortune in a statement. "Before it touches a file, it reads it. Before it references something I told it, it pulls from notes it wrote down at the time." He said that his version of NanoClaw "knows to never make things up -- if unsure, be honest about it and let's talk it out, like a human would." For McConley, the practical result is wearing many hats without the usual cost: "Context switching no longer slows me down. I can wear many hats at once without sacrificing quality or my sanity." The productivity gains executives are reporting: two to three times, in their own telling. "Our goal is to raise that floor," Gavriel said. "So that no risk, complete control -- that gets to 4x, gets to 5x." Better user experience, better approval flows, and continued product development are the path there. The company has also begun addressing a thornier challenge: enabling multiple employees to query the same agent without inadvertently leaking sensitive or private information across the organization. "There's a lot of work to do," he added, "just getting started." NanoClaw's architecture has drawn independent scrutiny beyond enterprise sales pitches. AI security firm Noma Security published a technical deep dive assessing the isolation model, permission controls and codebase auditability, ultimately providing specific enterprise deployment recommendations. The Cohens say several other security researchers have conducted similar reviews. NanoCo, based out of Tel Aviv, has a staff of 10 employees. NanoCo charges per agent, per month. Deployments range from hours -- for organizations without strict security requirements -- to several weeks for complex enterprise integrations involving internal data sources and custom skill-building.

NanoCo raises $12M to accelerate NanoClaw, a secure, enterprise-grade agentic AI assistant for every office worker - SiliconANGLE

NanoCo raises $12M to accelerate NanoClaw, a secure, enterprise-grade agentic AI assistant for every office worker NanoCo, the startup behind NanoClaw, a fast-growing open-source artificial intelligent agent that's secure by design, said today it has raised $12 million in seed funding. The oversubscribed round was led by Valley Capital Partners and saw participation from a host of others, including Vercel, Monday.com, Slow Ventures, Clutch Capital, Factorial Capital and Clem Delangue, the Chief Executive Officer of Hugging Face Inc. It came as the company announced the launch of its first enterprise-grade professional agentic artificial intelligence assistant. NanoClaw is a secure and lightweight professional AI agent that runs locally on people's computers, offering a safer alternative to complex agentic frameworks such as OpenClaw. It's designed to serve as an enterprise-grade agentic assistant that goes beyond what simple generative AI assistants can do. The agent learns an employee's role and adapts to their work style through ordinary conversation. It slowly develops an understanding of the work each user does, the tools they use, the projects they're working on, and the people they collaborate with, so that they can automate many of the tasks they perform with an unparalleled degree of accuracy. The user can then assign work to their assistant as necessary in order to become much more productive. Because NanoClaw agents are deployed directly onto the user's computer or a company's own infrastructure, they can use Docker containers to isolate agent sessions to ensure that they're only allowed to access files and directories they're given explicit permission to open. They also integrate with Vercel Inc.'s ChatSDK and OneCLI's credential vault, creating a unified architecture to ensure they cannot go rogue. The way this works is that every request is run through a secure gateway that injects the user's credentials at runtime, enforcing company-defined policies, based on the secrets management and vault systems used by the organization. Any sensitive actions require explicit human approval, and compliance teams will have enterprise-wide visibility into what each NanoClaw agent is doing. NanoCo co-founder and Chief Executive Gavriel Cohen (pictured left, alongside his brother and co-founder Lazer) told SiliconANGLE that countless early adopters, including multiple CEOs have reported how NanoClaw helps make them two-to-three times more productive once they get the hang of using it. "They're asking how to roll it out to their teams," he said. "They've figured out where the value actually lives: an agent has to be able to work inside the most sensitive parts of a business. Their email. Their customer records. NanoClaw was the version they could safely use themselves without trading security for functionality. NanoCo is allowing them to give that same unlock to everyone across the organization." Since launching in February, NanoClaw has achieved almost 29,000 GitHub stars, and has been adopted by executives at some of the world's biggest technology companies, including Amazon.com Inc., Google LLC, Accenture Plc, Meta Platforms Inc. and SentinelOne Inc. It has even gotten an endorsement from Singapore's foreign minister, Vivian Balakrishnan, who uses it to automate his own sensitive work and recently described it as having a "second brain" that he doesn't dare to switch off. "You get the output of a team two or three times your size, without expanding headcount until it's time," said another fan, Matt McConley, senior digital product manager at Johnson Health Tech and the founder of Looksphere.ai Inc. "After seeing what this does for a team of six, it's obvious that every employee at every company must have one." Valley Capital Partners' Steve O'Hara said AI is shifting from a tool that answers questions to become an assistant that can get work done for every business worker. "NanoCo has taken the lead, with formal partnerships with Docker and Vercel and a security-first architecture built in from day one," he said. "Enterprises aren't waiting another year to deploy. They're doing it now with NanoCo."