NanoClaw creator rejects $20M buyout, raises $12M seed

The creator of NanoClaw, a security-focused alternative to OpenClaw, has turned down a $20 million acquisition offer and instead closed an oversubscribed $12 million seed round following the project’s explosive viral launch, the founders confirmed exclusively to TechCrunch.

Valley Capital Partners led the funding round, with additional backing from Docker, Vercel, Monday.com, Slow Ventures, and notable angel investors including Clem Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face. The rapid ascent has been staggering. In under six weeks, founder Gavriel Cohen went from coding the project alone on his couch to receiving public endorsements from AI researcher Andrej Karpathy and Singapore’s foreign minister, fielding dozens of investor inquiries, and rejecting a roughly $20 million buyout offer alongside his brother and co-founder, Lazer Cohen.

“It was under six weeks from committing the first lines of code to a term sheet,” Gavriel said. “There was a lot of inbound and interest. People reaching out in DMs on X and sending emails.” He estimated that around 50 or more founders and tech executives slid into his DMs asking to invest.

One of those messages came from Delangue, who wrote: “I like what you’re doing with NanoClaw.” Gavriel responded by praising Hugging Face’s tiny robot, Reachy Mini, and expressing a hope to run NanoClaw on it someday. The two developers quickly shifted to technical discussions, and Cohen eventually asked if Delangue was open to angel investing , securing a yes. Remarkably, an active member of NanoClaw’s open source community is already working on integrating it with Reachy Mini.

The project’s momentum surged after Karpathy tweeted his approval, but the real turning point came when Singapore’s foreign minister called NanoClaw his “second brain” in a viral Facebook post. NanoClaw was originally built as a secure alternative to OpenClaw to help the Cohen brothers run their previous startup, an AI marketing firm that relied heavily on agents. Instead of running directly on a computer with full access to services and credentials, NanoClaw operates sandboxed inside a container, an approach increasingly adopted for more secure, OpenClaw-like setups.

Just a couple of months ago, the idea was novel and quickly took on a life of its own. As interest grew, the brothers began consulting investors and fellow founders about whether to turn the free project into a company , and how. One VC even offered to buy the project outright for a portfolio company, proposing a “six-digit” dollar amount.

While weighing that offer, they met a founder friend who delivered a crucial insight: Open-source projects grow exponentially more valuable as their community expands. Not only do contributors help mature the code quickly, but they also discover and demonstrate diverse use cases. The friend told the Cohens that if they believed NanoClaw could become that kind of project, they would need to shut down their other venture and go all in.

“He was right,” Gavriel said. Shortly after closing their previous business, the viral posts hit, and their new company secured partnerships with Docker and Vercel. About two weeks after the first buyout offer, a second one arrived , roughly $20 million, including jobs to stay and run the company. The brothers declined that too.

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

Now, NanoCo has begun booking enterprise customers, an idea sparked by the community. Early adopters, many of whom are technically skilled executives at major tech companies, set up their own NanoClaw instances , only to be flooded by coworkers asking for help replicating the setup. These users don’t want to become NanoClaw IT support, Cohen explained, but NanoCo does. The company now offers implementation services, what the industry calls “forward-deployed engineers,” to help businesses roll out NanoClaw AI agents to employees and provide ongoing support.

While NanoCo declined to name its early enterprise clients, the brothers confirmed that executives at companies including Amazon, Gap, Google, Meta, SentinelOne, and Accenture are already using NanoClaw.