NanoCo raises $12M seed

NanoCo said on May 20 that it had raised a $12 million seed round and launched a commercial AI assistant for enterprises built on its open-source NanoClaw framework. The company said Valley Capital Partners led the financing, with participation from Docker, Vercel, monday.com, Slow Ventures, Clutch Capital, Factorial Capital and Hugging Face Chief Executive Clem Delangue. NanoCo was founded in early 2026 by brothers Gavriel Cohen and Lazer Cohen, according to CTech. The company said NanoClaw is designed to let AI agents work inside sensitive enterprise systems while keeping credentials and actions under tighter controls. ### Who are the founders and what are they building? Gavriel Cohen and Lazer Cohen founded NanoCo in early 2026, CTech reported. Gavriel Cohen, the company’s chief executive, built NanoClaw “from scratch,” while Lazer Cohen previously founded Concrete Media, according to the report. NanoCo said it now employs 10 people. NanoClaw is an open-source platform for secure AI agents, and the new enterprise product is a professional assistant built on top of it, the company said. (calcalistech.com) Help Net Security reported that the assistant works inside tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams and is meant to carry out tasks directly, including drafting contracts, managing sales workflows and reviewing code. ### Why did this project get attention so quickly? NanoClaw launched as an open-source project in February 2026 and has since reached nearly 29,000 GitHub stars, NanoCo said. Help Net Security also reported that the project had surpassed 250,000 downloads. The company said executives at Amazon, Gap, Google, Meta, SentinelOne and Accenture were already using it personally. (calcalistech.com) TechCrunch reported that investor attention followed a viral launch and that NanoCo’s seed round was oversubscribed. The publication said the founders had also declined an acquisition offer of about $20 million after inbound interest accelerated in recent weeks. ### What is NanoCo saying makes NanoClaw different? NanoCo said the product is built for work inside “the most sensitive parts of a business,” including email and customer records. (calcalistech.com) Gavriel Cohen told CTech that enterprise users were already asking how to move from personal use to wider deployment across teams. Help Net Security reported that each agent runs in its own Docker-powered sandbox and that credentials are injected at runtime through a gateway rather than exposed directly to the agent. (techcrunch.com) The report said sensitive actions can require human approval, agent actions are logged, and customers can run agents on local models so data stays on company hardware. (calcalistech.com) ### Who backed the round and why do those names matter? Valley Capital Partners led the financing, and Docker and Vercel joined both as partners and investors, NanoCo said. Help Net Security reported that the Docker relationship grew out of work with Docker Sandboxes and that an introduction to Vercel Chief Executive Guillermo Rauch led to both an investment and a partnership. (helpnetsecurity.com) Clem Delangue invested as an angel, according to NanoCo and TechCrunch. TechCrunch reported that Delangue first contacted Gavriel Cohen directly after seeing NanoClaw’s open-source momentum. ### What comes next for the company? NanoCo said revenue from its enterprise product will fund continued development of the open-source NanoClaw project. Help Net Security reported that the company does not separate open-source investment from enterprise-product investment and that production feedback from users of the framework is feeding into the commercial platform. (calcalistech.com) The next step is commercial rollout of the enterprise assistant NanoCo announced on May 20. The company said customers can deploy it inside their own infrastructure or use a hosted version, while NanoClaw remains available as an open-source framework. (calcalistech.com) (helpnetsecurity.com)