Ando wants to take on Slack with a team messaging app that lets humans and agents work together

Ando, a startup founded by Sara Du, launched an AI-native team messaging app that gives autonomous agents identities, inboxes and the ability to join conversations alongside human coworkers. The company emerged from stealth and said it raised $20 million in pre-seed and seed financing from backers including Accel, Index Ventures and Emergence.

By AI Newsroom· Reviewed by Pranav, Founder & Editor-in-ChiefPublished about 2 hours agoUpdated about 2 hours ago0 views

Ando wants to take on Slack with a team messaging app that lets humans and agents work together

Why It Matters

As workplaces adopt AI agents, legacy collaboration tools like Slack and Teams are adapting but were not originally built with agents as first-class participants; a platform designed around agents could change how work is coordinated and reduce the need for humans to act as intermediaries. Ando’s product and funding signal investor interest in software that integrates agent workflows directly into team communication.

Key Facts

Founder: Sara Du
Product: Team messaging app built for both human users and AI agents
Funding: $20 million in pre-seed and seed funding
Investors: Accel, Index Ventures, Emergence
Features: Agent identities and inboxes, channels, DMs, group conversations, live calls with transcription

Sara Du founded Ando to address what she saw as limitations in existing collaboration platforms when connecting AI agents to workplace communication. While building MCP servers in 2025 she encountered repeated customer requests to use agents from within Slack, and concluded that many tools treat agents as add-on apps rather than participants in team conversations. Ando’s messaging platform is built around the premise that agents should directly participate in shared discussion spaces instead of relying on humans to relay their outputs.

Ando’s app gives agents persistent identities and inboxes and allows them to browse channels, join conversations without being explicitly tagged, and participate in DMs, group chats and live calls (calls can be transcribed for agent access). The product also enables agents to notify or message human teammates on their own when they determine a human should be informed, and to consolidate related discussions by bringing people together and explaining context.

The startup announced it has raised $20 million in pre-seed and seed funding from investors including Accel, Index Ventures and Emergence. Du said the company is already working with customers across software, real estate and finance in 15 countries, though many of those teams are currently small. She plans to use the capital to hire additional staff and to cover compute and token costs as the product scales.

Ando enters a market where incumbents have added agent capabilities—Slack has evolved its native bot into an AI agent and Microsoft has integrated Copilot into Teams—while new entrants such as Jack Dorsey’s Buzz also aim to combine people and agents in messaging. Du acknowledges early skepticism about Ando’s initial user experience, but said longer engagement from customers and agent behaviors such as autonomously merging parallel conversations convinced her the approach can change how coordination and execution happen inside teams.