Most tech companies have a technical founder first, and then someone to help with marketing and public relations. The company behind NanoClaw flipped that script.
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Lazer Cohen, a longtime public relations exec, brought his younger and more technical brother, Gavriel, in to build an AI-native PR agency last year. They knew that OpenClaw’s agents would be a huge help for their workflow but were spooked by its security flaws.
“So he built his own version, which was secure, lightweight, simple, and that is Nanoclaw,” Lazer Cohen told Business Insider of his brother’s efforts. “Then, almost as an afterthought, he decided to open-source it and post it on Hacker News. It starts doing really, really well.”
Three months later, the now-viral Tel Aviv company announced $12 million in seed funding on Wednesday to expand its personal agents to enterprises. It is now valued at $62 million.
The round was led by Valley Capital Partners, with participation from Docker, Vercel, Monday.com, and Clem Delangue, the CEO of Hugging Face. NanoClaw said it closed the oversubscribed round in four days and received an acquisition offer of $20 million within five weeks of launching the company.
Enthusiastic users include AI researcher Andrej Karpathy and Singapore’s foreign minister, Vivian Balakrishnan, who called it his “second brain” and said he won’t “dare switch it off.”
Lazer Cohen/NanoCo
NanoClaw’s CEO, Gavriel Cohen, said that the cash injection will be used to grow the company’s enterprise business.
“There’s been incredible demand from companies that want us to deploy a personal agent to every person in the organization,” the CEO said. “We’ve had over 100 companies reach out, and we’re growing the team quickly to meet the demand.”
The company, which has 10 employees, plans to hire researchers, go-to-market people, open-source maintainers, and AI engineers.
First of the claws
NanoClaw is the first among the “claws,” a group of autonomous, open-source AI agentic companies, to raise significant venture funding. AI agents use large language models to execute specific multi-step tasks semi-autonomously. Unlike chatbots, they can make decisions on behalf of the user, including through interactions with everyday applications.
Open-source agents like NanoClaw, OpenClaw, and NanoBot have seen blockbuster growth in the last few months. People around the world are using personal agents for practical and quirky uses such as productivity, stock trading, and even dating.
In February, OpenAI announced it was hiring Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw. It was seen as a move to accelerate OpenAI’s progress in the agentic AI space and evolve Codex from a coding assistant to an agent that can parse and reply to emails, manage files, and schedule meetings.
