NanoCo raises $12M seed round after rejecting acquisition offers

NanoCo, the company behind the open-source security tool NanoClaw, has raised an oversubscribed $12 million seed round—a term for early-stage funding. The investment round was led by Valley Capital Partners. Other participants in the funding round include:

• Docker
• Vercel
• Monday.com
• Slow Ventures
• Clem Delangue, the CEO of Hugging Face (an open-source AI platform)

The funding follows a transition for the startup, which began as a security-focused alternative to OpenClaw. Co-founders Gavriel and Lazer Cohen rejected an initial six-digit dollar acquisition offer for the project, followed shortly by a second acquisition offer of roughly $20 million. Instead of selling, the founders chose to pivot the project into a commercial entity, shuttering their previous AI marketing startup to focus entirely on NanoCo. To help businesses deploy AI agents, NanoCo is now offering implementation services, which the industry refers to as “forward-deployed engineers.” According to Gavriel Cohen, the creator of NanoClaw and co-founder of NanoCo, the timeline from writing the initial code to securing a term sheet was short: “It was under six weeks from committing the first lines of code to a term sheet.”

The company’s rapid growth was fueled by viral endorsements online. AI researcher Andrej Karpathy praised the tool, and the foreign minister of Singapore described NanoClaw as his second brain in a viral social media post. This public attention triggered significant inbound interest from investors and tech executives. Gavriel Cohen estimated that about 50 or more founders and tech executives sent direct messages on social media asking to invest. Among them was Delangue, who reached out to express his support for the NanoClaw project.

The company has already begun booking enterprise customers, drawing from its active open-source community. Early adopters of the tool include technical executives at technology firms who set up their own instances of the software. Because these users wanted ongoing support rather than managing the setup themselves, NanoCo decided to offer its implementation services to help these businesses roll out and maintain their AI agents.

Why it matters

NanoCo is transitioning from a viral open-source project to a commercial entity, offering “forward-deployed engineers” to help enterprise customers implement AI agents. This shift highlights how rapidly security-focused open-source AI tools can scale into commercial enterprises when backed by active developer communities.