The development team behind the AI agent tool NanoClaw declined an acquisition offer and instead chose to pursue independent funding to advance commercialization. According to TechCrunch, the new company has completed a $12 million seed round, after previously turning down an acquisition offer of approximately $20 million.
This round was led by Valley Capital Partners, with participation from Docker, Vercel, Monday.com, Slow Ventures, and Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue. Project developer Gavriel Cohen said the entire process, from writing the first line of code to receiving a term sheet, took less than six weeks.
The project quickly gained popularity due to public recommendations.
NanoClaw was originally developed by the Cohen brothers to support their previous AI marketing startup. Unlike running AI agents directly on the local machine, NanoClaw operates in containerized isolation to minimize security risks associated with agents accessing local services and account credentials.
The project's popularity surged rapidly in a short period. Previously, AI researcher Andrej Karpathy publicly praised NanoClaw, followed by Singapore’s Foreign Minister posting on social media, referring to it as his “second brain,” further driving the project’s spread.
Both acquisition offers were rejected.
As attention grew, the team began receiving numerous inquiries from investors and entrepreneurs. Cohen said that more than 50 founders and tech industry executives expressed investment interest via direct messages or email on X.
During this process, the team first received an acquisition offer in the six-figure dollar range, with the buyer seeking to integrate the project into its portfolio company. Approximately two weeks later, the team received another acquisition offer of approximately $20 million, with the buyer proposing that the founders remain on to operate the company. Both offers were ultimately declined.
Cohen said the team later realized that the value of an open-source project increases as the community grows—community members not only contribute code but also continuously expand use cases. Following this insight, the brothers shut down their original business and devoted themselves fully to NanoClaw.
Begin accepting enterprise deployment requests
The company has already begun acquiring enterprise customers. The team notes that the earliest users were primarily professionals with technical backgrounds, including executives from major tech companies. After deploying NanoClaw themselves, their colleagues began seeking similar support.
To meet this demand, NanoCo is offering enterprise implementation services to help companies deploy the NanoClaw agent to their employees and provide ongoing support. While the company has not disclosed the list of its first enterprise customers, it confirmed that executives from Amazon, Gap, Google, Meta, SentinelOne, and Accenture are already using NanoClaw.
Additional information: TechCrunch reports that NanoClaw has also partnered with Docker and Vercel; members of its open-source community are experimenting with running the tool on Hugging Face’s Reachy Mini robot.