Ando Launches Team Messaging App Bridging Human and AI Collaboration

In 2025, as Sara Du assisted companies in developing MCP servers, a recurring question emerged: how could teams leverage AI agents directly within Slack? The path was obstructed by significant technical barriers, including the complexity of message synchronization, context management, and the risk of exhausting token budgets.

Investigating these challenges, Du identified a fundamental flaw in the design of modern communication platforms. “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.”

Her proposed solution involved eliminating “meat proxies”—a term Du uses to describe the inefficient practice of humans relaying AI-generated work to their teams. “The human effectively becomes the messenger between the agent and the rest of the company,” she explained.

An optimal system, according to Du, would allow agents to “participate in the shared conversations where work already gets coordinated.” She argued that agents should be capable of understanding decision-making processes, asking colleagues questions, building upon the work of other agents, and escalating to human judgment when necessary.

On Thursday, Du’s startup, Ando, emerged from stealth mode with an application designed to achieve this vision: a team messaging platform engineered for both human employees and AI workers.

Ando positions itself as a comprehensive alternative to Slack or any other messaging service, specifically tailored for organizations utilizing AI agents for internal communication. The platform grants agents distinct identities and inboxes, enabling them to engage in conversations as naturally as human users.

The application supports channels, direct messages, group chats, and live calls, with the latter being transcribed and accessible to agents. Agents can browse channels, choose which conversations to join, and participate even without being explicitly tagged. If an organizational agent determines that a human employee needs to be informed, it can initiate contact independently rather than awaiting manual approval.

To support further development, Ando announced on Thursday that it has secured $20 million in pre-seed and seed funding from investors including Accel, Index Ventures, and Emergence.

Du’s concept is not entirely novel. Most major players in workplace collaboration have already integrated AI agent support; for example, Slack has evolved its native bot into an AI agent, while Microsoft has extensively integrated Copilot into Teams to connect with its Office 365 ecosystem.

However, a market opportunity remains for applications challenging established incumbents, driven by the rapid adoption of AI in workplaces. Just a few months ago, Twitter and Block co-founder Jack Dorsey announced Buzz, a messaging app that unites people and AI agents, though it is primarily targeted at developers.

Du believes there is still a competitive advantage in building an AI-agent-native team messaging platform, as legacy providers struggle to pivot their existing software architectures.

Nevertheless, Du acknowledges that Ando faces an uphill battle, noting that early progress was slow. “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.

However, the team recognized they were on the right track as customer engagement duration increased. With Ando, Du observed that agents could exceed expectations: an agent might notice two separate conversations in different channels discussing the same issue, proactively bring everyone together in a group chat, provide context, and even propose a decision.

“That was really delightful for me,” she said, “I felt agents could better manage people than humans can because they can process a lot more messages than a human can in a shorter span of time.”

Ando currently collaborates with clients in the software, real estate, and finance sectors across 15 countries, though many of the teams served are currently small. The newly raised capital will be allocated to hiring additional staff and increasing token usage, Du stated.

“I think agents will let very small teams operate at a scale that previously required hundreds of people,” she said. “They can take on more of the execution, research and coordination work, while humans spend more of their time on judgment, strategy and deciding what should happen next.”