NanoCo Raises $12 Million Seed Round After Viral NanoClaw Launch

NanoCo, the company behind the security-focused AI agent NanoClaw, raised an oversubscribed $12 million seed round following a viral launch, its founders told TechCrunch. com, Slow Ventures, and angel investors including Clem Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face.

Gavriel Cohen, creator of NanoClaw and co-founder of NanoCo, said the project began as an internal tool for the brothers' previous AI marketing startup. The tool runs sandboxed in a container rather than directly on a computer, a design intended to limit access to services and credentials.

Interest in NanoClaw increased after AI researcher Andrej Karpathy posted praise for the project. The project gained further attention when Singapore's foreign minister described NanoClaw as his "second brain" in a Facebook post.

The Cohen brothers received a six-digit acquisition offer for the project and later declined an approximately $20 million offer that included positions to continue running the company. Gavriel Cohen told TechCrunch the process moved quickly. "It was under six weeks from committing the first lines of code to a term sheet," Gavriel Cohen said.

NanoCo has begun offering implementation services to enterprise customers. Executives at companies including Amazon, Gap, Google, Meta, SentinelOne, and Accenture are using NanoClaw, the founders said.