NanoClaw Creator Turns Down $20M Buyout, Raises $12M Seed Instead

NanoClaw, a security-focused OpenClaw alternative, has raised an oversubscribed $12 million seed round following a viral launch.

NanoCo, the company behind NanoClaw, has seen a surge in interest after AI researcher Andrej Karpathy tweeted his praise for the project. The Foreign Minister of Singapore also 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. However, instead of running directly on a computer, with access to all services and credentials, NanoClaw runs sandboxed in a container.

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 went from coding the project on his couch to receiving viral endorsements and fielding inbound interest from dozens of investors.

“There was a lot of inbound and interest,” Gavriel told TechCrunch. "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.

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.

When asked about their early enterprise customers, the brothers say that executives at companies like Amazon, Gap, Google, Meta, SentinelOne and Accenture are using NanoClaw itself.

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