creators NanoClaw — an enterprise-friendly version of open-source, autonomous AI agent harnesses OpenClaw — is moving toward commercializing its technology for enterprises with the goal of providing a library of enterprise-validated secure AI agents and an ever-updating workplace context for every human.
Dual, including ex Wix.com engineer Gavriel Cohen and his brother Lazer Cohen, also founder of a tech public relations firm Concrete mediashared with VentureBeat that their new startup, NanoCo AIIt received a multi-subscriber seed round of $12 million led by Valley Capital Partners.
The round has a list of strategic backers that reads like an all-star team of enterprise infrastructure, including Docker, Vercel, monday.com, Factorial Capital and Clem Delang, CEO and founder of Hugging Face.
NanoCo AI wants to go beyond basic automation to offer secure work to every enterprise worker. "professional assistant." However, they’re still committed to building and maintaining NanoClaw as an MIT-Licensed, enterprise-friendly, open-source standard – just offering specialized commercial managed services integration on top of that.
New killer use case: an informed, constantly updated personal assistant for every employee
Gavriel, now CEO of NanoCo AI, sees this personalized approach as the ultimate unlock for the modern worker.
In a recent exclusive interview with VentureBeat, Cohen explained, “The killer use case is a single case of what we call a professional assistant.” "If you can give someone an agent and make them twice, three times as effective, you probably want more people, right?"
He noted that as users forward emails, documents, and call logs to an agent, they are systematically one "LLM wiki" – similar "LLM Knowledge Base" the concept expressed by the influential artificial intelligence researcher Andrej Karpathy — effectively creating a dynamic knowledge graph about the user’s specific work and projects.
This continuous memory allows the agent to move from simply answering questions to actively changing information and executing the first projects that compete with human output.
Cohen emphasized that the NanoClaw acts as a mass productivity multiplier, not a workforce replacement.
One-to-one safe “lobster” AI
NanoCo’s core offering is a one-to-one professional AI assistant designed to shadow employees, draft contracts, review code, and directly manage accounts within tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams.
Rather than a generic chatbot, the assistant learns the employee’s role and adapts to their specific work style through casual conversation.
How does NanoCo prevent this highly skilled assistant from stealing? By moving security away from agile agile engineering and embedding it directly into the infrastructure.
Unlike its predecessor and inspiration, even the popular open-source AI assistant OpenClaw—which grew to a whopping 400,000 lines of code—NanoClaw’s core logic was deliberately reduced to about 500 lines of TypeScript. This minimalism ensures that the entire system can be checked by a human security team in about eight minutes.
Furthermore, each NanoClaw agent operates in a strictly isolated environment. To use 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 emergency injection is strictly limited by the container and its dedicated communication channel,” Cohen previously explained.
To prevent unauthorized actions, raw API credentials never reach the agent itself. Instead, outgoing requests go through a secure OneCLI Rust Gateway that enforces company-defined policies. If an agent tries to sensitive "write" action—like changing the cloud environment or deleting an email—the gateway intercepts the request and pings the human user via a rich interactive card in Slack, Teams, or WhatsApp.
Only when the user taps explicitly "Confirm it" the system enters the credential. It’s the architectural equivalent of a highly skilled junior worker who drafts important corporate communications but is physically unable to click. "send" without turning the manager letter launch button.
Commitment to open source, MIT License continues
Despite the new enterprise push, NanoCo AI maintains 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 modify, modify, and run the system natively.
Simply put, the MIT License allows anyone to use the software commercially without paying NanoCo AI, provided they include the original copyright notice.
Instead, NanoCo’s AI monetization strategy focuses on the vast majority of enterprises that lack the specialized engineering resources to build, maintain, and scale their in-house agent platforms.
While highly technical teams can choose to build their own infrastructure on top of open source code, NanoCo will sell managed, enterprise-scale deployments, taking on the burden of health checks, integrations and ongoing security maintenance.
Widespread global acceptance
Open source adoption of NanoClaw has been astounding, surpassing 250,000 downloads and approaching 29,000 GitHub stars since its debut. This deployment rate is fully responsible for the increasing enterprise demand.
“Countless business leaders have told us the same thing,” Cohen said in a press release. “They run NanoClaw personally, do two or three times as much work, and ask how to roll it out to their teams.”
Perhaps the most high-profile endorsement 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 publicly posted about his personal use of the NanoClaw. Balakrishnan’s agent “gets smarter with time," referred to as his "second brain," and stated that he would not "dare to turn it off".
Cohen recently put the platform’s security claims to the test during a live conference demonstration in Singapore. He invited a crowd of 300 people to chat simultaneously with a personal agent actively connected to his real email and calendar.
Thanks to NanoClaw’s zero-trust gateway architecture, the agent successfully allowed 12 participants to book legitimate coffee chats while safely rejecting malicious attempts to access its inbox or delete existing events.
As AI moves from an innovation tool that answers questions to a digital workforce that performs tasks autonomously, NanoCo AI is betting that verifiable security will be a defining indicator of success. By combining a transparent open-source core with rigorous, infrastructure-level sandboxing, they’re not just selling a sidekick; they sell the peace of mind required for businesses to actually use one.
