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. However, there were many technical hurdles along the way. It’s about moving messages back and forth and having agents get the right context without exhausting your token budget.
After digging deeper into the issue, Du realized that there was a deeper problem stemming from the way communication platforms were designed. “The further we got into it, the more we felt that Slack and Teams were built for a world that was starting to outpace us,” Du told TechCrunch. “The agent was treated as an app to install even though it was a team participant.”
The solution, Du thought, might be a system that eliminates “meat proxies,” as Du calls the phenomenon where people have to relay the work of an AI agent to their team. “The human effectively becomes the messenger between the agent and the rest of the company,” she said.
An ideal system would allow agents to “participate in shared conversations where work is already coordinated,” Du said. “They should be able to understand why decisions are being made, ask questions of their colleagues, build on the work of other agents, and bring in humans when decisions need to be made.”
Her startup, Ando, unveiled an app out of stealth Thursday that aims to do just that. It’s a team messaging platform designed for both humans and AI workers.
Ando promotes itself as a perfect replacement for Slack and other messaging platforms that companies using AI agents may need for internal communications. The app gives agents a unique ID and inbox, allowing them to participate in conversations as naturally as people.
Du said the app has channels, DMs, group conversations, and even live calls that agents can transcribe and view. Agents can browse channels, choose which channels to join, and can even join conversations without being tagged. If a company’s agents decide they need to notify a human employee of something, they can send the message on their own without waiting for approval.
Ando announced Thursday that he has raised $20 million in pre-seed and seed funding from investors including Accel, Index Ventures and Emergence to continue developing the app.
Mr. Du’s idea is not new. Most major companies in the workplace collaboration space have already built in support for AI agents. For example, Slack turned native bots into AI agents, and Microsoft went to great lengths to integrate Copilot into Teams in a way that connects to the rest of the Office 365 suite.
But given the rapid infiltration of AI into the workplace, there is still a market for apps to compete with incumbents. 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, but it’s more aimed at developers.
Du also feels that there is still ample benefit in building an AI agent-native team messaging platform as traditional incumbents explore how to pivot their existing software.
Either way, she seems to understand that there’s a tough battle ahead for Ando, and said things were slow at first. “A lot of people who showed it early on were understandably unimpressed. It was, in many ways, just a junky messaging platform. People get stuck there before they understand what’s different about Agent,” she explained.
But when more customers started using Ando for an extended period of time, she said her team realized they were on to something. Thanks to Ando, she began to realize that agents can do more than people expect. Agents can notice two conversations happening on different channels about the same issue, and even bring everyone together in a group chat to provide context and suggest decisions without being asked.
“That was really exciting to me. I felt like agents could manage people better than humans because agents can handle far more messages in a shorter amount of time than humans,” she said.
He said Ando currently works with clients in the software, real estate and financial sectors in 15 countries, but many of the teams he currently serves are small. The new funding will be used to hire more people and burn more tokens, she said.
“I think agencies will be able to run very small teams at a scale that previously required hundreds of people,” she said. “While humans spend more time making judgments, strategizing, and deciding what happens next, humans can take on more of the execution, research, and coordination work.”
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