NanoCo, the company behind the open-source AI agent NanoClaw, has raised an oversubscribed $12m seed round led by Valley Capital Partners. The round was announced on 20 May 2026.
Docker, Vercel, monday.com, Slow Ventures, Clutch Capital and Factorial Capital took part, along with angel investors including Hugging Face chief executive Clem Delangue, according to Help Net Security. HyperAI reported that the round valued the Tel Aviv-based company at $62m.
According to TechCrunch, co-founders Gavriel Cohen and his brother Lazer Cohen turned down an acquisition offer of roughly $20m before raising. The company announced the round alongside the commercial launch of an assistant for businesses built on NanoClaw.
“It was under six weeks from committing the first lines of code to a term sheet.”Gavriel Cohen, Co-founder, NanoCo
What NanoClaw does
NanoClaw is a personal AI agent that people run on their own machines and reach through messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack and Signal. It was built as a more secure alternative to OpenClaw: each agent session runs in its own Docker container and sees only the files it is given, and by default the agent never holds raw API keys, according to the project's website.
NanoClaw launched as an open-source project in February 2026 and has since collected nearly 29,000 GitHub stars and more than 250,000 downloads, Help Net Security reported. TechCrunch reported that interest grew after AI researcher Andrej Karpathy praised it and Singapore's foreign minister called it his "second brain" in a viral post.
The brothers first built NanoClaw for their previous start-up, an AI marketing firm, and shut that business to focus on the project, TechCrunch reported. Gavriel Cohen told the publication that it took under six weeks from the first lines of code to a term sheet.
The enterprise product
NanoCo's business product works inside Slack, Microsoft Teams and other tools employees already use, and can draft contracts, manage sales accounts and review code, according to Help Net Security. The agent itself does not hold login credentials: a gateway adds them at runtime and enforces company policies, and sensitive actions require human sign-off.
The company can deploy into a customer's own cloud or host the assistant itself. TechCrunch reported that NanoCo offers forward-deployed engineers to help businesses roll out agents and that executives at Amazon, Gap, Google, Meta, SentinelOne and Accenture use NanoClaw. The company did not name its enterprise customers.
Who invested
Delangue became an angel investor after sending Gavriel Cohen a note about the project, TechCrunch reported; Cohen said about 50 or more founders and executives had sent messages asking to invest. Help Net Security reported that the Docker and Vercel partnerships grew out of community contacts, and that an introduction to Vercel chief executive Guillermo Rauch led to both an investment and a partnership.
According to HyperAI, NanoCo has about ten employees and plans to hire researchers, marketers, open-source maintainers and AI engineers. Gavriel Cohen, the company's chief executive, said the money would be used to expand its enterprise business, HyperAI reported. Lazer Cohen told Help Net Security that revenue from NanoCo funds continued open-source development.
Company website: nanoco.ai