NanoCo raises $12M seed for NanoClaw after turning down $20M acquisition offer

NanoCo, the company behind containerized AI agent tool NanoClaw, has raised a $12 million seed round after turning down a roughly $20 million acquisition offer, co-founder Gavriel Cohen told TechCrunch in a report published May 20, 2026.

The oversubscribed round was led by Valley Capital Partners, with participation from Docker, Vercel, Monday.com, Slow Ventures, and angel investors including Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue.

NanoClaw was originally built by brothers Gavriel and Lazer Cohen as a security-focused alternative to OpenClaw for their previous AI marketing startup. Unlike OpenClaw, NanoClaw runs sandboxed inside a container, limiting its access to services and credentials. After open-sourcing the project, the brothers received viral endorsements from AI researcher Andrej Karpathy and Singapore’s Foreign Minister, who called NanoClaw his “second brain” in a widely shared Facebook post.

The surge in attention came quickly. Gavriel said it took under six weeks from writing the first lines of code to receiving a term sheet. Before that, the brothers had already declined an earlier acquisition offer in the “six-digit” range and, about two weeks later, the larger $20 million buyout offer — which included roles to stay and run the company.

A conversation with a founder friend influenced their decision to stay independent. The friend advised that open-source projects grow significantly more valuable as their communities expand, and that committing fully to NanoClaw would require shutting down their other venture. The brothers did so, and the viral posts followed.

NanoCo has since begun targeting enterprise customers, offering implementation services to help businesses deploy NanoClaw to employees. The company says executives at Amazon, Gap, Google, Meta, SentinelOne, and Accenture are among those already using the tool, though it has not named its formal enterprise clients.