Ando, a startup founded by Sara Du, emerged from stealth on Thursday with a team messaging platform built for both human and AI workers. The company is positioning its app as a full replacement for Slack or any other internal messaging tool used by companies that deploy AI agents. Ando gives agents their own identities and inboxes so they can take part in conversations much as people do.
The app includes channels, direct messages, group conversations and live calls that agents can view through transcription, Du said. Agents can browse channels, choose which ones to join, and enter conversations without being tagged. If an agent determines a human worker should be notified of something, it can send that message on its own instead of waiting for approval.
Du said the idea grew out of her work in 2025 helping companies build MCP servers, when customers repeatedly asked how to use AI agents inside Slack. She described technical obstacles involving message flow and agent context without exhausting token budgets, and said the deeper problem was how communication platforms were designed. In her view, Slack and Teams were built for a world that was passing by, treating agents as installed apps even as they became team participants.
She said her aim was to remove what she calls meat proxies, the pattern in which a person relays an agent's work to colleagues and becomes a messenger between the agent and the company. Ando, she said, should let agents join the shared conversations where work is coordinated, understand why decisions were made, question colleagues, build on other agents' work and bring in a human when judgment is required.
Ando said it raised $20 million in pre-seed and seed funding from investors including Accel, Index Ventures and Emergence. Du acknowledged that the concept is not new: Slack has turned its native bot into an AI agent, and Microsoft has worked to integrate Copilot into Teams and the rest of Office 365. Jack Dorsey, the Twitter and Block co-founder, announced Buzz months ago, a messaging app that brings people and AI agents together but targets developers more directly.
Du said early demonstrations drew weak reactions because Ando looked like a rougher messaging platform, and people stalled on that before noticing the agent differences. She said the team gained confidence as more customers used Ando for longer periods, citing an agent that noticed two channels discussing the same problem and, unprompted, gathered everyone into a group chat with context and a suggested decision. She argued agents can manage people better than humans in some cases because they process far more messages in less time.
Ando is working with customers in software, real estate and finance across 15 countries, though many teams it serves are small. Du said the new capital will go toward hiring and token usage. She said agents will let very small teams operate at a scale that once required hundreds of people, taking on execution, research and coordination while humans focus on judgment, strategy and deciding what happens next.
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