Most tech companies start with technical founders before hiring marketing and PR talent. The story behind the AI agent company NanoClaw is precisely the opposite. Lazer Cohen, a seasoned public relations executive, co-founded an AI-native PR firm last year alongside his brother Gavriel, who has stronger technical expertise. They found that OpenClaw's agents were extremely helpful for workflows but were deterred by security concerns. "So he built his own version—safer, lighter, and simpler," Lazer told Business Insider. "Almost as an afterthought, he decided to open-source it and post it on Hacker News." The response was astonishing. Three months later, this Tel Aviv-based company announced closing $12 million in seed funding at a valuation of $62 million. The round was led by Valley Capital Partners, with participation from Docker, Vercel, Monday.com, and Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue. NanoClaw stated that this oversubscribed financing closed within four days, just five weeks after the company's founding, and had already received acquisition offers totaling $20 million. NanoClaw's fervent users include AI researcher Andrej Karpathy and Singapore Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan, the latter calling it his "second brain" and saying he dares not turn it off. CEO Gavriel Cohen said the funds will be used to expand enterprise business. "Over 100 companies have expressed interest in having us deploy personal agents for each employee," he noted. This ten-person team plans to hire researchers, marketers, open-source maintainers, and AI engineers. NanoClaw is the first company in the "Claw" family—a group of firms based around open-source, autonomous AI agents—to secure significant venture capital backing. Over the past few months, open-source agents have seen explosive growth globally, with users applying them across diverse scenarios ranging from productivity tools to stock trading and even dating apps. In February, OpenAI poached OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger, viewed as a critical step in accelerating its agent strategy and evolving Codex from a coding assistant into a general-purpose agent.