NanoCo raised an oversubscribed $12 million seed round led by Valley Capital Partners. The round drew participation from Docker, Vercel, Monday.com, Slow Ventures and angel investors including Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue.

The company is the maker of NanoClaw, a security-focused alternative to OpenClaw that runs sandboxed in a container. NanoClaw was created as a secure alternative to OpenClaw to assist the Cohen brothers with their previous AI marketing startup, a firm they later shuttered to focus on the new product. Founder Gavriel Cohen coded NanoClaw on his couch, and the path from initial development to outside investment moved quickly.

"It was under six weeks from committing the first lines of code to a term sheet," Cohen said.

About 50 founders and tech executives sent direct messages asking to invest, and AI researcher Andrej Karpathy posted praise for the product online. One venture capitalist offered to buy NanoClaw for a six-digit dollar amount, and a separate acquisition offer valued the company at around $20 million and included jobs for the founders. The Cohen brothers declined the $20 million offer. Delangue, in a message to the founder, said, "I like what you're doing with NanoClaw."

NanoCo has started booking enterprise customers, and executives at Amazon, Gap, Google, Meta, SentinelOne and Accenture are using NanoClaw. The company offers forward-deployed engineers services to help businesses roll out NanoClaw AI agents and provide ongoing support.

"Since then, it's only escalated. We have many thousands of people using NanoClaw," Cohen said.