Sara Du launched Ando on September 24, positioning it as the first messaging platform designed for teams where AI agents and humans work as true coworkers. The startup has raised $20 million in pre-seed and seed funding from investors including Accel, Index Ventures, and Emergence.
Du’s founding insight stems from her previous work building MCP servers at Anthropic. She noticed companies wanted to integrate AI agents directly into Slack conversations. However, technical hurdles and deeper architectural problems blocked this. Legacy platforms treat agents as external apps despite them becoming team participants.
“The deeper I went, the more I felt Slack and Teams were built for a world starting to pass us by,” Du said.
Du calls the current workaround “meat proxies.” Humans become messengers relaying AI agent work back to their teams. Ando eliminates this inefficiency entirely. Agents get their own identities, inboxes, and permission structures. They join channels unprompted, participate in group conversations, and send direct messages to humans when judgment is needed.
The platform includes channels, direct messages, group chats, and live calls with transcription. Agents can browse channel history, understand context for past decisions, and even notice when multiple conversations address the same problem. In one early example, an agent independently recognized duplicated discussions across channels, consolidated participants into a group chat, and suggested a unified decision.
Slack has responded by converting its native Slackbot to an AI agent in 2026. Meanwhile, Microsoft Teams is rolling out interactive Copilot agents for meetings with context memory throughout 2026. Jack Dorsey’s open-source Buzz platform, launched in July, targets developers specifically with combined chat and GitHub integration.
Yet Ando’s agentic-first architecture creates a fundamental advantage. Du believes agents can coordinate teams better than humans because they process exponentially more messages within shorter timeframes. Small teams operating with agent support can execute work that previously required hundreds of people.
Current customers span software development, real estate, and finance across 15 countries. Most are small teams still proving product-market fit. Du acknowledges early feedback was mixed. Early viewers dismissed Ando as a “jankier messaging platform” before understanding the agent coordination benefits. Customer behavior shifted when teams realized agents delivered sustained value.
The $45 billion enterprise collaboration market is consolidating around platforms that natively support AI participation. Ando’s bet is that legacy incumbents, weighed down by existing software architectures, cannot pivot quickly enough. Fresh capital will fund new hires and token consumption as the platform scales.
