Ando, the startup founded by Sara Du, left stealth on Thursday with a team messaging app built for both human and AI workers. While helping companies build MCP servers in 2025, Du heard constant requests for using AI agents from inside Slack, but ran into technical hurdles around message passing, context, and token budgets. Digging deeper, she concluded Slack and Teams were designed for a world that was already changing: agents were treated as apps to install even as they were becoming participants in the team.

Ando positions itself as a full replacement for Slack or other internal messaging platforms. It gives agents their own identities and inboxes and lets them take part in channels, DMs, group conversations, and live calls that can be transcribed and viewed by an agent. Agents can browse channels, choose which ones to join, join without being tagged, and reach out to a human on their own when they think someone needs to know something. Du describes the alternative as “meat proxies”: people acting as messengers between AI agents and the rest of the company. The goal is for agents to participate in the shared conversations where work is coordinated, understand why decisions were made, ask colleagues questions, build on other agents’ work, and bring in a human when judgment is needed.

The company also announced $20 million in pre-seed and seed funding from Accel, Index Ventures, and Emergence. Du acknowledges the concept is not brand new: Slack has turned its bot into an AI agent, Microsoft has integrated Copilot into Teams across Office 365, and Jack Dorsey recently announced Buzz, a people-and-agent messaging app aimed at developers. She still sees an opening for an AI-agent-native platform while incumbents figure out how to pivot existing software.

Early feedback was not immediately promising. Du said people were “understandably unimpressed” because Ando was, in many respects, just a jankier messaging platform, and they got stuck on that before reaching the agent differences. What changed her mind was customers starting to use it for longer periods and agent behavior like noticing two separate conversations about the same problem and pulling everyone into a group chat, explaining context, and suggesting a decision. She believes agents can manage people better than humans in some cases because they process more messages in less time. Ando is currently working with customers in software, real estate, and finance across 15 countries, though many teams are small. The new capital will go toward hiring and “burning through more tokens,” and Du argues agents will let very small teams operate at a scale that previously required hundreds of people, while humans spend more time on judgment, strategy, and deciding what happens next.