NanoClaw creator turns down $20M buyout offer, raises $12M seed instead

But a couple of months ago, the idea was novel and took on a life of its own. Seeing the interest, the Cohen brothers began talking to investors and other founders asking for advice. Should they turn this free project into a company? How? 

One VC offered to buy the project right then for one of his portfolio companies, offering a “six-digit” dollar amount, Gavriel said.

While contemplating that, the Cohen brothers met a founder friend who gave them a key insight: Open source projects grow exponentially more valuable as their community grows. Not only do these users help contribute code to mature the project quickly, but they also discover and demonstrate various uses.

He told the Cohen brothers that if they believed NanoClaw could be that kind of project, they would have to quit their other venture and commit to it.

“He was right,” Gavriel said. Shortly after they shuttered the other business and focused, the viral posts came, and their new outfit secured partnerships with Docker and Vercel. 

About two weeks after that first offer, they got another, this one for around $20 million, including jobs to stay and run their company. The brothers declined that one, too.

“Since then, it’s only escalated. We have many thousands of people using NanoClaw,” he said.

NanoCo has now started booking enterprise customers, an idea that came from its community. The product’s early adopters have been people with technical skills, many of whom are executives at Big Tech companies. After these users set up their own NanoClaw instances, they kept getting hit up by co-workers asking for help to do the same. 

These folks don’t want to become NanoClaw IT people, Gavriel explained, but NanoCo does. So it is offering implementation services, these days known as “forward-deployed engineers,” to help businesses roll out NanoClaw AI agents to employees and provide ongoing support.

While NanoCo declined to specify who their early enterprise customers are, the brothers say that executives at companies like Amazon, Gap, Google, Meta, SentinelOne, and Accenture are using NanoClaw.