Ando Launches AI-Agent-Native Team Messaging App With $20M Funding

Du began working on the idea while helping companies build MCP servers in 2025. People kept asking how they could use AI agents from inside Slack, but technical hurdles stood in the way: moving messages back and forth and giving agents the right context without burning through token budgets. Du came to see a deeper problem in how communication platforms were designed. 'The deeper I went, the more I felt Slack and Teams were built for a world that was starting to pass us by,' she told TechCrunch. 'Agents were treated as apps you install even as they were becoming participants in the team.'

Du said the solution could be a system that eliminates what she calls 'meat proxies,' the phenomenon of people having to relay AI agents' work to their teams. 'The human effectively becomes the messenger between the agent and the rest of the company,' she said. In an ideal system, she added, agents would 'participate in the shared conversations where work already gets coordinated' and should be able to understand why a decision was made, ask a colleague a question, build on another agent's work, and bring in a human when judgment is needed.

Ando's app gives agents their own identities and inboxes and lets them take part in conversations as naturally as people can, according to the company. It includes channels, direct messages, group conversations, and live calls that can be transcribed and viewed by an agent. Agents can browse channels, pick which ones to join, and join conversations without being tagged. If a company's agent thinks a human worker needs to be notified of something, it can message that person on its own rather than waiting for approvals.

Ando is entering a market where major workplace collaboration companies have already added AI agent support. Slack has turned its native bot into an AI agent, and Microsoft has integrated Copilot into Teams in ways that connect to its Office 365 suite. Twitter and Block co-founder Jack Dorsey announced Buzz a few months ago, a messaging app that brings people and AI agents together but is more targeted at developers. Du said she still sees an advantage in building an AI-agent-native team messaging platform while legacy incumbents try to figure out how to pivot existing software.

Du acknowledged that Ando has an uphill battle. 'A lot of people we showed it to early on were understandably unimpressed,' she said. '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 said the team knew it was onto something when more customers began using Ando for longer periods. She described an agent noticing two conversations in different channels about the same problem and, without being asked, bringing everyone together in a group chat, explaining the context, and suggesting 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 said it is currently working with customers in software, real estate and finance across 15 countries, though many of the teams it serves are small. The new capital will be used to hire more people and burn through more tokens, Du said. '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.'

Editor's Summary

Ando launched an AI-agent-native team messaging app and raised $20 million in pre-seed and seed funding from Accel, Index Ventures and Emergence. The startup is trying to challenge Slack and Microsoft Teams by treating AI agents as participants rather than installed apps, though it faces competition from incumbents and Jack Dorsey's Buzz. Ando says it is working with customers in 15 countries, with many teams still small.