Ando Wants to Take On Slack With a Team Messaging App That Lets Humans and Agents Work Together
When Sara Du was helping companies build MCP servers in 2025, people kept asking her how they could use AI agents from within Slack itself. But a bunch of technical hurdles stood in the way: moving messages back and forth and giving agents the right context, all without burning through token budgets.
Upon digging into the problem, Du realized there was a deeper issue stemming from how communication platforms were designed. "The deeper I went, the more I felt Slack and Teams were built for a world that was starting to pass us by," Du told TechCrunch. "Agents were treated as apps you install even as they were becoming participants in the team."
The solution, Du thought, could be a system that eliminates "meat proxies"—her term for the phenomenon of people having to relay AI agents' work to their teams. "The human effectively becomes the messenger between the agent and the rest of the company," she said.
An ideal system would instead let agents "participate in the shared conversations where work already gets coordinated," Du said. "They should be able to understand why a decision was made, ask a colleague a question, build on another agent's work, and bring in a human when judgment is needed."
Her startup, Ando, came out of stealth on Thursday with an app that sets out to do exactly that: a team messaging platform designed for both human and AI workers.
An Agent-Native Messaging Platform
Ando bills itself as a full replacement for Slack or any other messaging platform that companies using AI agents might want for internal communication. The app gives agents their own identities and inboxes, and lets them take part in conversations as naturally as people can.
The app has channels, DMs, group conversations, and even live calls that can be transcribed and viewed by an agent, Du said. Agents can browse channels, pick which ones to join, and even join conversations without being tagged. If a company's agent thinks a human worker needs to be notified of something, it can message them on its own rather than waiting for approvals.
To continue building the app, Ando said Thursday that it has raised $20 million in pre-seed and seed funding from investors including Accel, Index Ventures, and Emergence.
A Crowded but Growing Market
Du's idea isn't a new one. Most of the major players in the workplace collaboration space have already built in support for AI agents—Slack, for instance, has turned its native bot into an AI agent, and Microsoft has gone to great lengths to integrate Copilot into Teams in ways that connect to the rest of its Office 365 suite.
But there is still a market for apps challenging the incumbents, given how quickly AI is invading workplaces. Just a few months ago, Twitter and Block co-founder Jack Dorsey announced Buzz, which brings together people and AI agents into one messaging app, though it's more targeted at developers.
Du also feels there's still enough of an advantage in building an AI-agent-native team messaging platform as legacy incumbents try to figure out how to pivot their existing software.
An Uphill Battle
Regardless, she seems to understand that Ando has an uphill battle ahead of it, and said things were slow in the beginning. "A lot of people we showed it to early on were understandably unimpressed. It was, in many respects, just a jankier messaging platform. People would get stuck on that before they even got to what was different about the agents," she explained.
But she said her team knew they were onto something when more and more customers started using it.
via TechCrunch