Nanoco, the developer of Nanoclo, an AI agent tool that promotes itself as a secure OpenClo, has raised $12 million in seed funding, TechCrunch reported on Tuesday.

Nanoco also received an acquisition offer of about $20 million after the project launch, but rejected it and chose to remain independent.

The funding round was led by Valley Capital Partners. Docker, Vercel, Monday.com, Slow Ventures and Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue (클렘 들랑그) also participated. Gabriel Cohen (가브리엘 코언), who created Nanoclo, said it took less than 6 weeks from writing the first code to securing a term sheet. He added that more than 50 founders and tech industry executives expressed interest in investing.

Nanoclo is a tool the Cohen brothers developed for an AI marketing startup they previously ran, and it promotes itself as a secure alternative to OpenClo. Instead of directly accessing all services and credentials on a computer, it is designed to run in a sandboxed environment inside a container.

A well-known AI researcher, Andrej Karpathy, praised Nanoclo, and a Facebook post by Singapore's foreign minister calling it his second brain spread widely, leading to a sharp rise in users, TechCrunch reported.