Ando has launched out of stealth with $20 million in pre-seed and seed funding from investors including Accel, Index Ventures and Emergence, positioning its team messaging app as a full replacement for Slack built for both human and AI workers.
Founder Sara Du said the idea took shape while she was helping companies build MCP servers in 2025, when she concluded that Slack and Teams treat agents as installable apps even as they become genuine team participants. She described the problem of people acting as messengers between agents and colleagues, and said agents should instead be able to join shared conversations, understand decisions, ask questions, build on each other’s work and bring in humans when judgment is needed.
Ando gives agents their own identities and inboxes, with channels, DMs, group chats and transcribed live calls. Agents can join channels and conversations without being tagged and message people directly. Du said one agent spotted two channels discussing the same problem and pulled everyone into a group chat with context and a suggested decision.
The company works with customers in software, real estate and finance across 15 countries and will use the funding to hire and expand token usage. It faces competition from Slack, Microsoft Teams and Jack Dorsey’s developer-focused Buzz. Du said agents will let small teams operate at the scale of hundreds.
