NanoClaw creators decline $20 million acquisition offer and raise $12 million seed round instead

NanoCo, maker of NanoClaw (a security-focused alternative to OpenClaw that runs in sandboxed containers), raised $12 million in an oversubscribed seed round led by Valley Capital Partners, with participation from Docker, Vercel, Monday.com, Slow Ventures, and angel investors including Clem Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face.

Founders Gavriel Cohen and Lazer Cohen declined a roughly $20 million acquisition offer from another party in order to build NanoClaw as an independent company. The project went viral within weeks following endorsements from AI researcher Andrej Karpathy and Singapore's foreign minister, who called it his 'second brain.'

NanoCo is now booking enterprise customers through implementation services, helping businesses deploy NanoClaw AI agents (software that can make decisions and take actions) to employees. Early users include executives at Amazon, Gap, Google, Meta, SentinelOne, and Accenture.