Key Takeaways
- NanoCo secured a $12 million seed round following a viral launch of its security-focused alternative to OpenClaw called NanoClaw.
- The founders, Gavriel and Lazer Cohen, turned down an acquisition offer of around $20 million due to the potential for exponential growth in their community-driven project.
- NanoCo has now begun booking enterprise customers, particularly from large tech companies like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Accenture, who are leveraging NanoClaw AI agents within their organizations.
NanoClaw was created as a secure alternative to OpenClaw by Gavriel Cohen. The project gained significant traction after being endorsed by Andrej Karpathy and the Singapore Foreign Minister. Initially, it ran directly on computers but now uses containers for added security.
“It was under six weeks from committing the first lines of code to a term sheet,” Gavriel told TechCrunch. “There was a lot of inbound and interest.” He estimated that about 50 or more founders and tech executives sent DMs asking to invest.
One key insight came from a founder who advised the Cohen brothers: Open-source projects grow exponentially in value as their community grows, contributing both by helping mature the project and discovering various uses.
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