The creators of NanoClaw – an enterprise-friendly version of the hit open source, autonomous AI agent harness OpenClaw – are moving towards commercializing their technology for large-scale enterprises, with the goal of providing them with secure AI agents and an ever-updating library of workplace context for every human employee approved by the enterprise.
Former Wix.com engineer Gavriel Cohen and his brother Lazar Cohen, who is also the 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, led by Valley Capital Partners.
The round includes a roster of strategic backers that looks like an enterprise infrastructure all-star team, including Docker, Vercel, monday.com, Factorial Capital, and Clem Delangu, CEO and founder of Hugging Face.
Buoyed by seed round, Nanoco AI looks to move beyond basic automation to provide security for every enterprise employee "Professional Assistant." Yet they are still committed to building and maintaining NanoClaw as an MIT licensed, enterprise-friendly, open source standard – simply offering the integration of specialized commercial managed services on top of it.
The new killer use case: An informed, always-updating personal assistant for every 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 one for what we’re calling professional assistants,” Cohen explained in a recent exclusive interview with VentureBeat. "If you can give someone an agent and make them double, triple as effective, you’ll probably want more people too, right?"
He said that as users forward emails, documents and call notes to the agent, it systematically builds a "llm wiki" – similar to "LLM Knowledge Base" The concept – expressed by influential AI researcher Andrzej Karpathy – effectively creates a dynamic knowledge graph of a user’s specific jobs and projects.
This persistent memory allows the agent to move from simply answering questions to actively transforming information and executing first drafts that rival human output.
Cohen emphasized that nanoscale 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.
Instead of a generic chatbot, the assistant learns the employee’s role and adapts to their specific work style through simple conversations.
How does Nanoko stop this highly capable assistant from turning evil? By taking security away from delicate quick engineering and embedding it directly into the infrastructure.
Unlike its predecessor and inspiration, even the popular open source AI assistant OpenClave – which grew to 400,000 lines of code – NanoClave’s core logic was deliberately reduced to about 500 lines of TypeScript. This minimalism ensures that the entire system can be audited by a human security team in approximately eight minutes.
Furthermore, each NanoClaw agent operates in a strictly isolated environment. Leveraging a strategic partnership with Docker announced in March, Nanoco AI runs these agents inside a MicroVM-based Docker sandbox.
“In NanoClaw, the ‘blast radius’ of potentially accelerated injection is strictly limited to the container and its specific communication channel,” Cohen previously explained.
To prevent unauthorized actions, raw API credentials never reach the agent. Instead, outbound requests pass through a secure oneCLI Rust gateway that enforces company-defined policies. If an agent makes a sensitive attempt "Write" The action – such as modifying the 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 user explicitly taps "approve" Does the system inject credentials? This is the architectural equivalent of a highly competent junior employee drafting an important corporate communication, but physically unable to click through. "Send" Without changing the literal launch key by the manager.
Continued commitment to open source, MIT license
Despite promoting its new venture, 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 words, the MIT License allows anyone to make commercial use of the software without paying Nanoco AI, provided they include the original copyright notices.
Nanoco AI’s monetization strategy instead focuses on the majority of enterprises that lack the specialized engineering resources to build, maintain, and scale internal agent platforms.
While high-tech teams may choose to build their own infrastructure on top of open-source code, Nanoco will sell managed, organization-wide deployments, taking on the burden of health checks, integration, and ongoing security maintenance.
wide global acceptance
NanoClaw’s open-source adoption has been staggering, approaching 250,000 downloads and 29,000 GitHub stars since its launch. This is entirely responsible for the increasing demand for ground motion enterprise.
“Countless enterprise executives have told us the same thing,” Cohen said in the press release. “They’re running Nanoclaw individually, getting two and three times more work done, and asking how to deliver it to their teams.”
Perhaps the most high-profile recognition came during the founders’ recent visit to Singapore. The country’s Foreign Minister Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan invited the Nanoco team to his office after he posted publicly about his personal use of Nanoclaw. Balakrishnan described the agent as “getting smarter with time”." claimed it as mine "second brain," And said he wouldn’t do it "dare to turn it off".
Cohen put the platform’s security claims to the ultimate test during a live conference demonstration in Singapore. They invited a crowd of 300 people to have a one-on-one conversation with their personal agent, who actively connected to their real emails and calendars.
Thanks to NanoClaw’s zero-trust gateway architecture, the agent securely rejected malicious attempts to access their inbox or delete existing events, while successfully allowing up to 12 attendees to book legitimate coffee chats.
As AI is transforming from an innovative tool that answers questions to a digital workforce that executes tasks autonomously, 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 accessory; They are selling the peace of mind needed for enterprises to actually use it.
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