In a matter of weeks, NanoClaw creator Gavriel Cohen (pictured above, left) said he went from coding the project on his couch to receiving viral endorsements from Andrej Karpathy and Singapore’s foreign minister, fielding inbound interest from dozens of investors, and even a roughly $20 million acquisition offer that he and his brother and co-founder, Lazer Cohen (pictured above, right), declined.

“It was under six weeks from committing the first lines of code to a term sheet,” Gavriel told TechCrunch.

“There was a lot of inbound and interest,” he added. “People reaching out in DMs on X and sending emails.” He estimated that about 50 or more founders and tech executives sent DMs asking to invest.

One of them was Delangue, who dropped a note: “I like what you’re doing with NanoClaw.” Gavriel then responded in kind, telling the Hugging Face CEO that he liked the company’s tiny robot, Reachy Mini, and hoped to run NanoClaw on it one day.