NanoCo Raises $12M Seed for Sandboxed AI Agent Platform After Viral Open Source Launch

NanoCo, the company behind security-focused AI agent platform NanoClaw, has closed an oversubscribed $12 million seed round led by Valley Capital Partners, with participation from Docker, Vercel, Monday.com, Slow Ventures, and angel investor Clem Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face.

Brothers Gavriel and Lazer Cohen built NanoClaw as a sandboxed, container-based alternative to OpenClaw, designed to run AI agents securely without direct access to a computer’s credentials and services. The project went viral after endorsements from AI researcher Andrej Karpathy and Singapore’s foreign minister, who described it as his second brain. The brothers declined both a six-figure acquisition offer and a subsequent $20 million buyout before closing the seed round — reached within six weeks of the first lines of code being written.

NanoCo is now converting community momentum into enterprise revenue, offering forward-deployed engineers to help organisations roll out NanoClaw at scale. Executives at Amazon, Google, Meta, and Accenture are among early individual users.

Featured image: Credit: NanoCo