Ando exits stealth with $20M for a team messenger built for humans and AI agents

Ando, a San Francisco startup founded by Sara Du, came out of stealth on Thursday with a team messaging platform for people and AI agents, and said it raised $20 million in pre-seed and seed funding. The company pitches it as a full replacement for Slack or Microsoft Teams where agents do real work.

Agents as coworkers, not installed apps

Du told TechCrunch the question came up in 2025, while she was building MCP servers with companies: how do you use AI agents inside Slack? Moving messages back and forth, giving agents the right context and controlling token budgets were all technical hurdles.

Deeper down, she argues, is a design problem. "The deeper I went, the more I felt Slack and Teams were built for a world that was starting to pass us by," Du said. "Agents were treated as apps you install even as they were becoming participants in the team." People who relay an agent's work are, in her phrase, "meat proxies": "the human effectively becomes the messenger between the agent and the rest of the company", she said.

What the platform does

In Ando, agents get their own identities and inboxes. They can browse channels, pick which ones to join, take part in conversations without being tagged, and message a person directly without waiting for approval. They follow context, keep persistent memory and can join live "Jams". Private messages stay private: an agent cannot read them unless the user forwards that context. For people, a normal messenger works as usual, down to calls with transcription.

Ando also works with outside agents such as Codex, Claude, Grokbot and Devin, and offers its own hosted harness. Access goes through a waitlist, and the company says it suits teams of up to about 30 people. Customers in software, real estate and finance span roughly 15 countries. Pricing is per human seat, with no metering of agent messages or actions.

Competition and what comes next

Slack has turned its native bot into an AI agent, and Microsoft has threaded Copilot through Teams and Office 365. In July, Twitter and Block co-founder Jack Dorsey announced Buzz, which also mixes people and agents but leans toward developers. Du still sees an edge in building for agents from the start.

She is candid about the early reaction. "A lot of people we showed it to early on were understandably unimpressed. It was, in many respects, just a jankier messaging platform," she said. Customers started staying longer after that.

The new money will go toward hiring and, as Du put it, burning through more tokens. "I think agents will let very small teams operate at a scale that previously required hundreds of people," she said.