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 there were a bunch of technical hurdles in the way: moving messages back and forth and getting agents the right context, all without burning through token budgets. Upon digging into the problem, Du realized that there was a deeper issue that stemmed from how communication platforms were designed.
An ideal system would instead let agents “participate in the shared conversations where work already gets coordinated,” Du said. 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, inboxes and lets them partake 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 can 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 on Thursday said it has raised $20 million in pre-seed and seed funding from investors including Accel, Index Ventures and Emergence. 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 to challenge 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.
Regardless, she seems to understand that Ando has an uphill battle ahead of it, and said that things were slow in the beginning. 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.
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