The creator of NanoClaw rejected a $20 million buyout offer, raising $12 million instead

nano coThe company behind security-focused OpenClaw alternative NanoClaw has raised an oversubscribed $12 million seed round after a viral launch, its founders tell TechCrunch.

The funding was led by Valley Capital Partners, and saw participation from Docker, Vercel, Monday.com, Slow Ventures and angels such as Clem Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face.

Within weeks, NanoClaw’s creator, Gavriel Cohen (pictured above, left), said he went from programming the project on his couch to receiving widespread endorsements from Andrei Karpathy and the Singapore Foreign Minister, garnering inbound interest from dozens of investors, and even a nearly $20 million takeover offer that he and his brother and co-founder, Laser Cohen (pictured above, right) rejected.

“It’s been less than six weeks since the first lines of code in the term sheet were implemented,” Gavriel told TechCrunch.

“There was a lot of attention and interest,” he added. “People are communicating via DMs on X and sending emails.” He estimated that about 50 or more founders and technology executives sent direct messages asking for investment.

Delangue was one of them, who dropped a remark: “I like what you’re doing with the NanoClaw.” Gavriel then responded in kind, telling Hugging Face’s CEO that he loved the company A small robot, Reachy Miniand hopes to run NanoClaw on it one day.

After that, the two programmers started talking, and eventually Cohen asked DeLange if he was interested in angel investing and got a yes.

As it turns out, an active member of the open source NanoClaw community is already working on it on the Reachy Mini, Gavriel says.

like We reported previouslyinterest in the NanoClaw skyrocketed after artificial intelligence researcher Andrei Karpathy tweeted his praise of it. But the project is really starting to take off after Singapore’s Foreign Minister called NanoClaw his “second brain.” Share Facebook That spread quickly.

NanoClaw was created as a secure alternative to OpenClaw to help the Cohen brothers with their previous startup, an AI-powered marketing company that uses agents to do most of the work. But instead of running directly on a PC, with access to all services and credentials, NanoClaw runs sandboxed in a container – a common practice It has become a popular solution to run more secure OpenClaw-like setups.

But a few months ago, the idea was new and took on a life of its own. Given this interest, the Cohen brothers began talking to other investors and founders for advice. Should they turn this free project into a company? how?

Cohen said a venture capitalist offered to buy the project at the time for one of his portfolio companies, offering a “six-figure” dollar sum.

While thinking about this, they met a founder friend who gave them a key idea: open source projects grow in value exponentially as their community grows. These users not only help contribute code to quickly develop the project, but they also discover and demonstrate various uses.

He told the Cohen brothers that if they thought NanoClaw could be this kind of project, they would have to drop their other project and stick with it.

“He was right,” said Gavriel. Shortly after they closed the other company and focused on it, viral posts came, and their new company secured partnerships with Docker and Vercel.

About two weeks after that first offer, they received another offer worth about $20 million, including jobs to stay on and run their company. The brothers also refused.

“Since then, things have escalated. We have several thousand people using NanoClaw,” he said.

NanoCo is now starting to book enterprise clients, an idea that came from its community. The product’s early adopters were people with technical skills, many of them executives at major technology companies. After these users set up their own NanoClaw instances, they continued to get hit on by co-workers asking for help doing the same.

Cohen explained that these people don’t want to become IT specialists at NanoClaw, but NanoCo does. So it offers implementation services, known these days as “deployed engineers of the future,” to help companies roll out NanoClaw AI agents to employees and provide ongoing support.

While NanoCo declined to identify its early enterprise customers, the brothers say executives at companies like Amazon, Gap, Google, Meta, SentinelOne, and Accenture are using NanoClaw itself.