Meet the brothers who turned a homegrown AI agent into a $12 million bet on the future of work — in six weeks

Lazer Cohen, 41, had spent 15 years building other people’s companies. His younger brother Gavriel, 36, had spent a decade writing code. Together, they’d quietly bet on each other — their parents included, having invested in the brothers’ earlier AI marketing agency venture before NanoClaw existed.

When Gavriel sat down on Jan. 29 and wrote the first line of code for NanoClaw, he wasn’t thinking about fundraising. He was trying to solve a problem: the agentic tools available to him were powerful but dangerously insecure. So Gavriel, a former Wix developer with a physics and computer science background plus years of obsessive after-hours AI tinkering, built his own.

Six weeks later, NanoCo had a term sheet.

“We’ve just started rolling out professional assistants to businesses,” Gavriel told Fortune. “We’ve had over 100 companies reach out to us. There’s just more and more reaching out every single day.”

NanoCo’s $12 million seed round — led by Valley Capital Partners, with participation from Docker, Vercel, Monday.com, Slow Ventures, Clutch Capital and Factorial Cap, plus angel investments from Clem Delangue of HuggingFace, Matias Woloski of Auth0, and Vanja Josifovski, the former CTO of Airbnb — makes NanoCo the first company in the rapidly growing “claw” space to close institutional funding. The round was oversubscribed.

When Lazer told his longtime PR clients he was pivoting to build his own startup, the reaction surprised even him. “Any apprehension about what my move would mean for them was outweighed by their excitement,” he said. Two immediately asked to invest. Four more former clients followed. They’re all in the round.

When Lazer told his longtime PR clients he was pivoting to build his own startup, the reaction surprised even him. “Any apprehension about what my move would mean for them was outweighed by their excitement,” he said. Two immediately asked to invest. Four more former clients followed. They’re all in the round.

An ‘overnight’ success, 15 years in the making

The Cohen brothers grew up together and, eventually, built businesses together — though not always in the same direction. Lazer, the elder, built Concrete Media into a PR firm that helped launch over 100 startups. Gavriel spent a decade in engineering, leading a developer team at Wix before the AI wave pulled him toward something bigger.

Lazer said that when Gavriel formally joined Concrete Media five years ago, their written partnership agreement explicitly anticipated future startups emerging from the collaboration. “It’s one of those overnight successes that are 10 to 15 years in the making,” he said.

The pivot to NanoClaw came organically. “We set up........

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