The funding round was led by Valley Capital Partners, with additional backing from Docker, Vercel, Monday.com, Slow Ventures, and individual investors such as Clem Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face. Gavriel Cohen, creator of NanoClaw (pictured on the left above), described how in just a few weeks, his project evolved from a casual coding session on his couch to receiving viral endorsements from notable figures like Andrej Karpathy and Singapore’s foreign minister. He also fielded interest from dozens of investors and turned down an acquisition offer worth roughly $20 million, which came from his brother and co-founder, Lazer Cohen (pictured on the right above).

“There was a lot of inbound and interest,” Gavriel added. “People reaching out in DMs on X and sending emails.” He estimated that around 50 or more founders and tech executives sent direct messages asking to invest. One of those was Delangue, who simply wrote, “I like what you’re doing with NanoClaw.” Gavriel responded by expressing his admiration for Hugging Face’s tiny robot, Reachy Mini, and his hope to run NanoClaw on it someday. The two programmers then delved into technical discussions, and eventually Cohen asked Delangue if he was interested in angel investing—securing a yes. As it turns out, an active member of NanoClaw’s open source community is already working on running it on Reachy Mini, Gavriel noted.

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As previously reported, interest in NanoClaw skyrocketed after AI researcher Andrej Karpathy tweeted his praise for the project. But the real momentum came when Singapore’s Foreign Minister called NanoClaw his “second brain” in a viral Facebook post. NanoClaw was originally created as a secure alternative to OpenClaw, designed to assist the Cohen brothers with their previous startup—an AI marketing firm that relied heavily on agents. Instead of running directly on a computer with full access to all services and credentials, NanoClaw operates sandboxed within a container. This approach is becoming more common for running secure, OpenClaw-like setups, though just a couple of months ago, the idea was novel and quickly took on a life of its own.

Seeing the growing interest, the Cohen brothers began consulting with investors and other founders for advice on whether to turn this free project into a company—and how to do so. One venture capitalist offered to buy the project outright for one of his portfolio companies, proposing a “six-digit” dollar amount, Cohen said. While considering that offer, they met a founder friend who shared a crucial insight: Open-source projects grow exponentially more valuable as their community expands. Not only do users contribute code to mature the project quickly, but they also discover and demonstrate various use cases. He advised the Cohen brothers that if they believed NanoClaw could become that kind of project, they would need to leave their other venture and commit fully. “He was right,” Gavriel said.

Shortly after they shut down the other business and focused entirely on NanoClaw, the viral posts emerged. Their new company secured partnerships with Docker and Vercel. About two weeks after the initial offer, they received another—this time for approximately $20 million, which included jobs to stay and run their company. The brothers declined that offer as well. “Since then, it’s only escalated. We have many thousands of people using NanoClaw,” Gavriel said.

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NanoCo has now started booking enterprise customers, an idea that originated from its community. The product’s early adopters are technically skilled individuals, many of whom are executives at major tech companies. After setting up their own NanoClaw instances, these users frequently received requests from coworkers asking for help to do the same. These coworkers don’t want to become NanoClaw IT support, Cohen explained, but NanoCo does. So the company now offers implementation services, known as “forward-deployed engineers,” to help businesses roll out NanoClaw AI agents to employees and provide ongoing support. While NanoCo declined to name its early enterprise customers, the brothers confirmed that executives at companies like Amazon, Gap, Google, Meta, SentinelOne, and Accenture are using NanoClaw.