Ando exits stealth with $20M Slack rival built for human and AI teammates

Ando, a startup founded by Sara Du, came out of stealth on Thursday with a team messaging platform built for a mixed workforce of humans and AI agents. Alongside the launch, the company announced $20 million in combined pre-seed and seed funding from backers including Accel, Index Ventures and Emergence, according to TechCrunch.

The idea grew out of Du's work in 2025, when she was helping companies build MCP servers and clients kept asking how they could run AI agents directly inside Slack. As TechCrunch reports, the initial obstacles were technical: shuttling messages back and forth and supplying agents with the right context without draining token budgets. But the deeper Du dug, the more she concluded the real problem was structural. Today's communication tools were designed for teams made entirely of people, and they treat agents as installable apps even as agents become genuine participants in the work.

Removing the human middleman

Du has a name for the workaround most teams rely on today: the "meat proxy," meaning a person who relays an agent's output to everyone else. In an agent-native system, she argues, agents should take part in the same conversations where work is already coordinated, following why a decision was made, asking a colleague a question, building on another agent's work, and bringing in a human when judgment is required.

What the app does

According to TechCrunch, Ando pitches itself as a full replacement for Slack or any other internal messaging platform, not an add-on. Agents get their own identities and inboxes, and the app offers the familiar furniture of channels, direct messages and group chats, plus live calls that can be transcribed so agents can review them. Agents can browse the channel list and choose which ones to join, and they can enter conversations without being tagged. When an agent decides a person needs to know something, it can message them on its own initiative rather than waiting for approval.

A crowded field

The concept is not without competition. Slack has already converted its native bot into an AI agent, and Microsoft has woven Copilot deeply into Teams and the broader Office 365 suite. A few months before Ando's launch, Twitter and Block co-founder Jack Dorsey unveiled Buzz, another messaging app that mixes people and agents, though it leans toward developers. Du's counterargument, per TechCrunch, is that incumbents are retrofitting older architectures while Ando is agent-native from the ground up.

Rough start, promising signals

Du is candid that early demos underwhelmed: people saw a clunkier messaging app and never got far enough to notice the agent features. What convinced her team was sustained usage. In one case, an agent noticed two separate channels discussing the same problem and, without being asked, pulled the participants into a group chat, laid out the context and suggested a decision. Du told TechCrunch she came away thinking agents may be better at coordinating people than humans are, simply because they can process far more messages in far less time.

Ando currently works with customers in software, real estate and finance across 15 countries, though many of those teams are small. The new capital is earmarked for hiring and for covering the inference costs of running agents at scale.

Why it matters

Ando is a direct test of whether collaboration software gets rebuilt around agents rather than patched to accommodate them. Du's larger claim is that agents will let very small teams operate at a scale that previously required hundreds of people, absorbing execution, research and coordination work while humans concentrate on judgment, strategy and deciding what happens next. If that scenario plays out, the platform where humans and agents coordinate becomes core infrastructure, and Slack and Teams, despite their distribution advantages, would be defending software designed for a different era. The $20 million from Accel, Index and Emergence signals that investors see an opening. Whether enterprises are willing to rip out their existing chat tool to reach for it is the question Ando now has to answer.