The creators of NanoClaw — the hit open source, enterprise-friendly variant of autonomous AI agent harness OpenClaw — are moving towards commercializing their technology for enterprises at scale, aiming to provide them with secure AI agents, and an ever-updating library of workplace context, for each human employee the enterprise has approved.
The duo, including former Wix.com engineer Gavriel Cohen and his brother Lazer Cohen, also founder of tech public relations firm Concrete Media, shared with VentureBeat that their new startup, NanoCo AI, has received a $12 million oversubscribed seed round was led by Valley Capital Partners.
The round features a roster of strategic backers that reads like an enterprise infrastructure all-star team, including Docker, Vercel, monday.com, Factorial Capital, and Hugging Face CEO and founder Clem Delangue.
Buoyed by the seed round, NanoCo AI wants to move beyond basic automation to offer every enterprise worker a secure "professional assistant." Yet they are still committed to building out and maintaining NanoClaw as an MIT Licensed, enterprise-friendly, open source standard — just offering specialized commercial managed services integration atop it.
The new killer use case: an informed, ever-updating personal assistant for each human worker
Gavriel, now CEO of NanoCo AI, sees this personalized approach as the ultimate unlock for the modern worker.
“The killer use case is the the one to one we're calling it professional assistant,” Cohen explained in a recent exclusive interview with VentureBeat. "If you can give someone an agent and make them twice, three times as effective, then you probably want more people as well, right?"
He noted that as users forward emails, documents, and call notes to the agent, it systematically builds an "LLM wiki" — similar to the "LLM Knowledge Base" concept articulated by influential AI researcher Andrej Karpathy — effectively creating a dynamic knowledge graph of the user's specific job and projects.
This persistent memory allows the agent to shift from simply answering questions to actively transforming information and executing first drafts that rival human output.
Cohen emphasized that NanoClaw acts as a massive productivity multiplier rather than a headcount replacement.
One-to-one secure 'lobster' AI
NanoCo’s core offering is a one-to-one professional AI assistant designed to shadow employees, draft contracts, review code, and manage accounts directly within tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams.
Rather than a generic chatbot, the assistant learns the employee's role and adapts to their specific working style through ordinary conversation.
How does NanoCo prevent this highly capable assistant from going rogue? By moving security away from fragile prompt engineering and embedding it directly into the infrastructure.
Unlike its predecessor and inspiration, the even popular open source AI assistant OpenClaw — which grew to a massive 400,000 lines of code — NanoClaw’s core logic was intentionally minimized to roughly 500 lines of TypeScript. This minimalism ensures the entire system can be audited by a human security team in about eight minutes.
Furthermore, every NanoClaw agent operates within a strictly isolated environment. Leveraging a strategic partnership with Docker announced in March, NanoCo AI runs these agents inside MicroVM-based Docker Sandboxes.
“In NanoClaw, the 'blast radius' of a potential prompt injection is strictly confined to the container and its specific communication channel,” Cohen previously explained.
To prevent unauthorized actions, raw API credentials never reach the agent itself. Instead, outbound requests pass through a secure OneCLI Rust Gateway that enforces company-defined policies. If an agent attempts a sensitive "write" action—like modifying a cloud environment or deleting an email—the gateway intercepts the request and pings the human user via a rich interactive card on Slack, Teams, or WhatsApp.
Only when the user explicitly taps "Approve" does the system inject the credential. It is the architectural equivalent of a highly capable junior employee drafting an important corporate communication, but being physically unable to click "send" without the manager turning a literal launch key.
Continued commitment to open source, MIT License
Despite its new enterprise push, NanoCo AI is maintaining its commitment to its open-source foundation. The core NanoClaw framework remains available under the permissive MIT License, meaning independent developers and companies can continue to fork, modify, and run the system locally.
In plain terms, the MIT License allows anyone to use the software commercially without paying NanoCo AI, provided they include the original copyright notice.
NanoCo AI's monetization strategy instead focuses on the vast majority of enterprises that lack the specialized engineering resources to build, maintain, and scale internal agent platforms.
While highly technical teams can choose to build their own infrastructure on top of the open-source code, NanoCo will sell managed, organization-wide deployments, taking on the burden of health checks, integrations, and ongoing security maintenance.
Widespread global adoption
The open-source adoption of NanoClaw has been staggering, crossing 250,000 downloads and nearing 29,000 GitHub stars since its debut. This ground-up momentum is entirely responsible for the surging enterprise demand.
“Countless enterprise executives have told us the same thing,” Cohen stated in the press release. “They're running NanoClaw personally, getting two and three times more done, and asking how to roll it out to their teams.”.
Perhaps the most high-profile validation came during the founders' recent trip to Singapore. The country’s Foreign Minister, Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan, invited the NanoCo team to his office after publicly posting about his personal use of NanoClaw. Balakrishnan described the agent as “getting smarter over time," referred to it as his "second brain," and stated he wouldn't "dare switch it off".
Cohen put the platform's security claims to the ultimate test during a live conference demonstration in Singapore. He invited a crowd of 300 people to chat simultaneously with his personal agent, which was actively connected to his real email and calendar.
Thanks to NanoClaw's zero-trust gateway architecture, the agent safely rejected malicious attempts to access his inbox or delete existing events, while successfully allowing 12 attendees to book legitimate coffee chats.
As AI shifts from a novelty tool that answers questions into a digital workforce that autonomously executes tasks, NanoCo AI is betting that verifiable security will be the defining metric of success. By combining a transparent open-source core with strict, infrastructure-level sandboxing, they aren’t just selling an assistant; they are selling the peace of mind required for enterprises to actually use one.
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