NanoCo Raises $12M Seed Led by Valley Capital Partners After Rejecting $20M Buyout

NanoCo, the company behind the open-source AI agent framework NanoClaw, raised an oversubscribed $12 million seed round led by Valley Capital Partners while rejecting a roughly $20 million acquisition offer its founders described to TechCrunch.

“NanoCo, the company behind the security-focused AI agent platform NanoClaw, has raised a $12 million seed round following a viral launch that drew interest from top tech investors and even a $20 million acquisition offer”

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TechCrunch reported that Gavriel Cohen said it was "under six weeks from committing the first lines of code to a term sheet," and that the brothers and co-founder Lazer Cohen declined the acquisition offer after it came in within that rapid window.

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In parallel, Whalesbook said the founders declined a $20 million acquisition offer received just six weeks after launching the code and secured $12 million in seed funding led by Valley Capital Partners.

TechCrunch added that NanoClaw was created as a secure alternative to OpenClaw, running sandboxed in a container rather than directly on a computer with access to all services and credentials.

The same TechCrunch account tied the surge in investor interest to viral endorsements after AI researcher Andrej Karpathy praised NanoClaw and after Singapore’s foreign minister called it his "second brain" in a Facebook post.

NanoCo said it is rolling out enterprise AI assistants after more than 250,000 open-source downloads of NanoClaw, with the assistants designed to integrate with a company’s internal tools and knowledge systems.

In a statement to ynetnews, Gavriel Cohen said, "Enterprise executives kept telling us they were already using NanoClaw personally and wanted to expand it across their organizations," linking the push to security requirements and operational fit.

Business Insider

NanoCo’s enterprise assistants are described as operating inside workplace tools including Slack and Microsoft Teams, and as running in a separate Docker-powered sandbox environment with credentials managed through external gateways rather than being directly exposed to the agent itself.

SiliconANGLE quoted Gavriel Cohen saying, "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," including email and customer records.

The same SiliconANGLE piece said sensitive actions require explicit human approval and that compliance teams have enterprise-wide visibility into what each NanoClaw agent is doing.

NanoCo’s seed round drew participation from Docker, Vercel, monday.com, Slow Ventures, Clutch Capital, Factorial Capital, and Clem Delangue, with Business Insider and SiliconANGLE both tying the financing to the company’s plan to expand its personal agents into enterprises.

“NanoClaw creator NanoCo lands $12 million in Seed funding to build enterprise AI agents Open-source startup says its AI agents are already used by executives at Amazon, Google and Meta”

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Business Insider reported that NanoClaw was valued at $62 million and said the company’s CEO, Gavriel Cohen, told the outlet, "There's been incredible demand from companies that want us to deploy a personal agent to every person in the organization," adding that "We've had over 100 companies reach out."

SiliconANGLE said NanoClaw has achieved almost 29,000 GitHub stars since launching in February and that it has been adopted by executives at companies including Amazon, Google, Accenture, Meta, and SentinelOne.

TechCrunch said NanoCo began booking enterprise customers after community-driven demand, and described its implementation services as "forward-deployed engineers" to help businesses roll out NanoClaw AI agents to employees.

Across the coverage, the Singapore foreign minister Vivian Balakrishnan is cited as an early high-profile user who called NanoClaw his "second brain" and said he won’t "dare switch it off," while Clean Clothes Campaign spokesperson Ineke Zeldenrust is not part of this technology story and is absent from these NanoClaw accounts.