NanoClaw creator turns down $20M buyout offer, raises $12M seed instead
NanoCo has successfully raised $12 million in a seed funding round for its security-focused product, NanoClaw. The company declined a $20 million acquisition offer to focus on building its community and product. With endorsements from notable figures, interest in NanoClaw has surged, leading to partnerships and enterprise customer bookings.
- ▪NanoCo raised an oversubscribed $12 million seed round led by Valley Capital Partners.
- ▪The founders, Gavriel and Lazer Cohen, declined a $20 million acquisition offer to focus on their project.
- ▪Interest in NanoClaw grew significantly after endorsements from AI researcher Andrej Karpathy and Singapore's foreign minister.
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| Original publisher | Startups | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/nanoclaw-creator-turns-down-20m-buyout-offer-raises-12m-seed-instead/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 20 May 2026 14:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-20T14:01:50.993Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-20T15:21:05.575Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | srJRvY7nXOEI · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
NanoCo, the company behind security-focused OpenClaw alternative NanoClaw, has raised an oversubscribed $12 million seed round following a viral launch, its founders tell TechCrunch. The funding was led by Valley Capital Partners, and saw participation from Docker, Vercel, Monday.com, Slow Ventures and angels like Clem Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face. In a matter of weeks, NanoClaw creator Gavriel Cohen (pictured above, left) said he went from coding the project on his couch to receiving viral endorsements from Andrej Karpathy and Singapore’s foreign minister, fielding inbound interest from dozens of investors, and even a roughly $20 million acquisition offer that he and his brother and co-founder, Lazer Cohen (pictured above, right), declined.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Startups | TechCrunch.
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