NanoClaw founders secure $12M seed round after declining $20M acquisition

NanoCo announced a $12 million seed round led by Valley Capital Partners, with backing from Docker, Vercel, Monday.com, Slow Ventures, and individual investors including Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue. The raise came after NanoClaw, an open-source framework for running AI agents in sandboxed containers, reached thousands of users in under six weeks following endorsements from AI researcher Andrej Karpathy and Singapore's foreign minister.

The project originated as an internal tool for the Cohen brothers' earlier AI marketing startup. Rather than grant agents direct system access, NanoClaw isolates them in containerized environments—a security approach that has since become standard practice but was less common when the project launched. The framework's rapid adoption prompted the founders to shut down their previous venture and focus exclusively on NanoClaw.

Gavriel Cohen told TechCrunch that the company declined an acquisition offer valued at approximately $20 million in the weeks following launch. A founder advisor had counseled the brothers that open-source projects accumulate value as their user communities grow, contribute code, and demonstrate new use cases. That insight influenced the decision to remain independent and pursue community-driven development rather than sell early.

NanoCo is now moving into enterprise delivery through implementation services, sometimes called forward-deployed engineering, aimed at companies deploying NanoClaw across internal teams. The founders stated that users from Amazon, Gap, Google, Meta, SentinelOne, and Accenture are already running NanoClaw instances internally, though they declined to identify specific paying customers or contract values.