Ando, a team messaging platform built specifically for humans and AI agents to work together, came out of stealth on Thursday. Founder Sara Du started the company after helping firms build MCP servers in 2025, when customers repeatedly asked how to use agents inside Slack. She found that Slack and Teams were designed before AI agents became team members, forcing humans to act as "meat proxies"—relaying agent output to the rest of the organization.
The app gives agents their own identities and inboxes, allows them to browse channels, join conversations without being tagged, and message coworkers directly. Agents can also participate in live calls via transcripts and proactively pull humans into discussions when judgment is needed. Du says the goal is to let agents "participate in the shared conversations where work already gets coordinated," rather than treating them as installed apps.
Ando has raised $20 million in pre-seed and seed funding from Accel, Index Ventures, and Emergence. The startup is working with customers in software, real estate, and finance across 15 countries, though many of the teams are small. Du acknowledges the uphill battle against incumbents like Slack and Microsoft Teams, which are adding their own AI features, and notes that early demos were often dismissed as a "jankier messaging platform." Still, she sees agents enabling very small teams to operate at a scale that once required hundreds of people, with humans focusing on judgment and strategy. The fresh capital will go toward hiring and expanding the product.