NanoClaw, a security-focused alternative to OpenClaw built by brothers Lazer and Gavriel Cohen, has raised $12 million in seed funding at a $62 million valuation. The Tel Aviv-based startup is the first company in the growing “claw” ecosystem of open-source agent platforms to secure venture capital.

The Round

Valley Capital Partners led the oversubscribed round, which closed in four days, according to Business Insider. Docker, Vercel, Monday.com, and Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue also participated. The company received a $20 million acquisition offer within five weeks of launching, which it turned down.

NanoClaw currently has 10 employees and plans to hire researchers, go-to-market staff, open-source maintainers, and AI engineers with the new capital.

Origin Story

The company started as a side project inside the Cohens’ PR agency. Lazer Cohen, the elder brother and a veteran PR executive, brought in Gavriel, an engineer, to build an AI-native agency last year. They wanted to use OpenClaw agents for their workflow but were concerned about its security vulnerabilities.

“So he built his own version, which was secure, lightweight, simple, and that is NanoClaw,” Lazer Cohen told Business Insider. “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 after that Hacker News post, the company announced its seed round.

Enterprise Demand

CEO Gavriel Cohen said the funding will go toward growing NanoClaw’s enterprise business. “There’s been incredible demand from companies that want us to deploy a personal agent to every person in the organization,” he told Business Insider. “We’ve had over 100 companies reach out, and we’re growing the team quickly to meet the demand.”

The enterprise pitch centers on security: NanoClaw positions itself as offering hardened security policies and least-privilege defaults where OpenClaw has historically struggled. OpenClaw’s security record has been a persistent concern, with China’s CNNVD recording 111 vulnerabilities between April 14 and 28 alone, and the OpenClaw foundation publishing a five-point security roadmap in response to over 150,000 vulnerable instances.

Notable Backers and Users

AI researcher Andrej Karpathy, who recently joined Anthropic’s pre-training team, is an enthusiastic NanoClaw user. Singapore’s foreign minister Vivian Balakrishnan called NanoClaw his “second brain” and said he won’t “dare switch it off,” according to Business Insider.

The Competitive Landscape

NanoClaw enters a market where open-source agent platforms are fragmenting rapidly. OpenClaw remains the dominant player but faces competition from NanoBot, Hermes Agent, and now Google’s Gemini Spark, which launched at I/O 2026 targeting OpenClaw’s local-first model with 900 million existing Google users. Automation Anywhere’s EnterpriseClaw, announced this week in collaboration with Cisco, Nvidia, Okta, and OpenAI, adds another enterprise-grade option.

The $12 million seed round at a $62 million valuation signals that investors see security as the wedge that can pry enterprise customers away from OpenClaw’s larger but more vulnerability-prone ecosystem. Whether NanoClaw can scale from 10 employees and a PR agency origin story to meet the demand of 100+ enterprise prospects will determine if this bet pays off.