The Cohen brothers just walked away from a $20 million acquisition offer. Instead, they closed an oversubscribed $12 million seed round for NanoClaw, their security-focused alternative to OpenClaw, according to TechCrunch AI. The round was led by Valley Capital Partners with participation from Docker, Vercel, Monday.com, Slow Ventures, and angel investors including Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue.
What stands out here is the timeline. TechCrunch AI reports that founder Gavriel Cohen went from typing the first lines of code on his couch to signing a term sheet in under six weeks. Along the way, the project picked up viral endorsements from Andrej Karpathy and Singapore’s foreign minister, who called NanoClaw his “second brain” in a Facebook post that exploded.
How a side project became a company
NanoClaw started as a tool the Cohen brothers built for their previous startup, an AI marketing agency that ran on agents. The novelty: instead of giving the agent direct access to a computer’s services and credentials, NanoClaw runs sandboxed inside a container. That sandbox model is now becoming standard practice for safer OpenClaw-style setups, but a few months ago, it was new ground.
The turning point came from a founder friend who told the brothers something simple: open source projects compound in value as their community grows. If they believed in NanoClaw, they’d need to shut down the marketing agency and commit fully. They did. Days later, the viral posts hit, and Docker and Vercel partnerships followed.
The offers they turned down
- A VC offered a “six-digit” buyout for one of his portfolio companies
- A second offer landed around $20 million, including roles for the brothers to stay on and run the company
- Roughly 50 founders and tech executives slid into Gavriel’s DMs on X asking to invest
Delangue’s investment came out of a casual exchange. He messaged Gavriel that he liked what NanoClaw was doing. Gavriel mentioned he hoped to one day run NanoClaw on Reachy Mini, Hugging Face’s tiny robot. The two started trading notes, and an angel check followed. An active contributor in the open source community is reportedly already porting NanoClaw to that robot.
Why this matters
Sandboxed AI agents are quickly becoming the default answer to a real problem: most agent frameworks today need broad access to credentials and services on the host machine. That’s a security nightmare for any company letting agents touch internal systems. NanoClaw’s container-based approach addresses it directly, which explains the enterprise pull.
According to TechCrunch AI, executives at Amazon, Gap, Google, Meta, SentinelOne, and Accenture are already running NanoClaw. The pattern is consistent: technical leaders install it for themselves, then colleagues start asking for help. NanoCo is now offering “forward-deployed engineers” to roll it out across companies, a playbook borrowed from Palantir and increasingly common among AI infrastructure startups.
What comes next
The Cohen brothers are betting that an open source community and a paid enterprise services layer will be worth more than $20 million in cash today. Given that thousands of users are already running NanoClaw and Fortune 500 executives are deploying it inside their orgs, the math may work in their favor. Expect more agent infrastructure startups to follow the sandbox-first pattern, and expect the buyout offers in this space to keep climbing.
Full details available at the original TechCrunch AI report.