NanoCo, the startup behind the security-focused AI tool NanoClaw, has successfully closed an oversubscribed $12 million seed funding round. The investment was led by Valley Capital Partners, with notable participation from industry leaders including Docker, Vercel, Monday.com, Slow Ventures, and Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue. This financial milestone follows a period of rapid growth for the project, which transitioned from a side experiment to a high-demand enterprise solution in just a few weeks.

Founders Gavriel and Lazer Cohen initially developed NanoClaw as a secure, sandboxed alternative to OpenClaw to support their previous AI marketing venture. The project gained significant momentum after receiving public endorsements from prominent figures such as AI researcher Andrej Karpathy and the Foreign Minister of Singapore. The surge in popularity led to intense interest from the investment community, including a $20 million acquisition offer that the brothers ultimately declined to maintain independence and focus on long-term community growth.

Following the advice of mentors who emphasized the exponential value of open-source communities, the Cohen brothers shuttered their previous business to dedicate their efforts to NanoCo. The company is now pivoting toward enterprise services, offering “forward-deployed engineers” to help organizations implement NanoClaw AI agents. With thousands of active users, the platform has already seen adoption among technical staff at major corporations including Google, Meta, Amazon, and Accenture, signaling a strong market appetite for secure, containerized AI agent management.