Ando wants to take on Slack with a team messaging app that lets humans and agents work together
TechCrunch Dominic-Madori Davis
Ando launched a Slack-like app for people and AI agents to work in the same chats. Its bet: stop making humans relay agent work back and forth.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Dominic-Madori Davis — read the original for the full story.
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Sara Du says the problem wasn’t just getting AI agents into Slack. It was the whole shape of workplace chat. While helping companies build MCP servers in 2025, she kept running into the same complaint: teams wanted agents inside the conversation, not hovering outside it, waiting for a human to pass notes.
That pushed her toward Ando, which came out of stealth on Thursday with a simple pitch and a pretty aggressive one: replace Slack, or at least replace the need for it in companies leaning hard on AI. The app gives agents their own identities and inboxes, and lets them move through channels, direct messages, group chats and live calls that can be transcribed for them. They can browse channels, choose where to join, and even jump into a conversation without being tagged.
The bigger idea is to remove what Du calls “meat proxies” — the human in the middle, relaying what the agent found to everyone else. In Ando’s setup, an agent can message a person on its own if it thinks that person should be notified. It can also spot when two conversations in different channels are circling the same issue, pull people together, explain the context and suggest a decision.
Ando is not the first company to notice this opening. Slack has already built AI into its own bot, and Microsoft has pushed Copilot deep into Teams and Office 365. Jack Dorsey’s Buzz is also trying to mix people and agents in one messaging app, though it leans toward developers. But Du is betting that a system built for agents from day one can move faster than incumbents trying to bolt the future onto old software.
Investors seem willing to pay for that bet. Ando said it raised $20 million in pre-seed and seed funding from Accel, Index Ventures and Emergence. It is already working with customers in software, real estate and finance across 15 countries, mostly small teams for now. Du says the goal is to help tiny groups operate at a scale that used to take hundreds of people, with humans focusing on judgment and strategy while agents handle more of the execution, research and coordination.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the right idea, and also the kind that makes legacy chat vendors sweat. Once agents are doing real coordination work, shoving them into a sidebar starts to look quaint, like faxing a spreadsheet. The catch is obvious: the app has to be better than “jankier messaging” before anyone will forgive the switch, which is usually where startup dreams go to get mugged.
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