NanoCohe company behind OpenClaw’s security-focused alternative NanoClaw has raised a $12 million round that was oversubscribed after a viral launch, its founders tell TechCrunch.
The funding came from Valley Capital Partners and included 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, sparking inbound interest from dozens of investors, and even a roughly $20 million buyout offer that he and his brother, Lapictured, Lapicturer-founder, turned down.
“It was less than six weeks from committing the first lines of code to a term sheet,” Gavriel told TechCrunch.
“There was a lot of input and interest,” he added. “People who DM to X and email.” He estimated that about 50 or more founders and tech executives sent DMs asking to invest.
One of them was Delangue, who left a note: “I like what you’re doing with the NanoClaw.” Gavriel then responded in kind, telling Hugging Face’s CEO that he liked the company’s tiny robot, the Reachy Mini, and hoped to run the NanoClaw on it one day.
The two developers then got to talking, and Cohen eventually asked Delangue if he was interested in angel investing, and he secured a yes.
As it turns out, an active member of the NanoClaw open source community is already working on running it on the 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 started snowballing after Singapore’s Foreign Minister called NanoClaw his “second brain” in a Post on Facebook that went viral.
NanoClaw was created as a secure alternative to OpenClaw to help the Cohen brothers with their previous startup, an AI marketing company 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 in a sandbox in a container—a practice that’s becoming a common solution for running more secure OpenClaw-like setups.
But a few months ago, the idea was original and took on a life of its own. Seeing the interest, the Coen brothers began talking to investors and other founders asking for advice. Should they turn this free project into a company? How;
A VC offered to buy the project right then for one of his portfolio companies, offering a “six-figure” dollar amount, Cohen said.
While thinking about this, they met a founder friend who gave them a key insight: open source projects become exponentially more valuable as their community grows. Not only do these users help contribute code to rapidly mature the project, but they also discover and demonstrate various uses.
He told the Coen brothers that if they thought NanoClaw could be that kind of project, they should drop their other venture and commit to this one.
“He was right,” Gabriel said. Shortly after they closed the other business and focused, the viral posts came and their new outfit secured partnerships with Docker and Vercel.
About two weeks after the first offer, they got another one, this one for about $20 million, including jobs to stay and run their company. The brothers refused this too.
“Since then, it’s only escalated. We have many thousands of people using the NanoClaw,” he said.
NanoCo has now started booking corporate customers, an idea that came from its community. The product’s early adopters were people with technical skills, many of whom are executives at large technology companies. After these users created their own instances of NanoClaw, they continued to be hit by colleagues asking for help doing the same.
These people don’t want to become NanoClaw IT people, Cohen explained, but NanoCo does. So it offers implementation services, these days known as “advanced engineers,” to help businesses deploy NanoClaw AI agents to employees and provide ongoing support.
While NanoCo declined to specify who their first corporate customers are, the brothers say executives at companies such as Amazon, Gap, Google, Meta, SentinelOne and Accenture are using the NanoClaw itself.
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