The startup, founded by second-time founder Sara Du, has emerged from stealth with $20 million in funding from Accel, Index Ventures and Emergence Capital, and is opening its team messaging platform to a wider group of users. The company believes that as organizations begin working with dozens, and eventually hundreds, of AI agents, existing workplace communication tools were not designed for the kind of human-agent collaboration that is now emerging.
Ando is building a messaging platform where humans and AI agents can operate alongside one another as members of the same team. Rather than treating agents as bots, integrations or private assistants that sit on the edge of an organization, Ando gives them persistent identities, permissions, shared context and memory. Agents can participate in channels, direct messages and group conversations, follow discussions, contribute proactively and take action based on what is happening around them. The platform also includes live conversations, called Jams, where humans and agents can interact in real time. Ando is deliberately agent-agnostic, allowing companies to bring in agents and AI harnesses they already use, including products such as Codex, Claude and Grokbot.
The idea comes at a moment when the role of AI inside companies is changing quickly. For more than a decade, platforms such as Slack and Microsoft Teams have provided the communication layer for human-to-human work informs TechCrunch. But AI agents are increasingly being used across software development, customer support, research, legal, finance and operations, creating a new coordination problem: how do people and multiple agents share context, divide responsibilities and build on one another’s work without everything becoming fragmented across individual tools? Ando’s bet is that the next generation of workplace software will need to be designed around this more “multiplayer” model from the beginning, rather than simply adding AI features to products built for humans.
“Every major computing shift creates new systems for how work gets coordinated,” said Ivan Zhou, Partner at Accel. “Agents aren’t simply another feature inside existing workplace software. They’re becoming participants in companies themselves.” Accel led an earlier pre-seed round in Ando, while Index Ventures and Emergence Capital are also backing the company in its latest financing. The combination of investors reflects growing interest in software infrastructure designed specifically around the emergence of AI agents as active participants in businesses.
For Du, this is the second company she has built. She previously founded Alloy Automation, an enterprise API platform focused on workflow automation and integrations in e-commerce, and was also a Thiel Fellow. She says the limitations of existing workplace software became increasingly obvious as she considered how agents would operate alongside humans. “This isn’t about whether Slack or Teams can add agents. Of course they can,” Du said. “Starting from scratch, unencumbered by legacy scaffolding, lets us design around what agents are actually capable of rather than what existing software allows them to be.”
The distinction is central to Ando’s pitch. In most companies today, an AI agent is still effectively something an employee opens, prompts and closes. It may be able to perform a task, but it often lacks the organizational context to understand what the rest of the team is doing, what decisions have already been made or what information it is allowed to access. Ando is trying to make agents more like actual participants in a workplace: they can see the conversations they have permission to access, retain context over time and become part of ongoing workflows rather than operating as isolated assistants.
That approach also means Ando is positioning itself as more than another Slack alternative. The company’s ambition is to become a shared coordination layer connecting communication, tasks and agent operations. Sofia Dolfe, Partner at Index Ventures, argues that Ando’s structured approach to context could allow it to connect these different aspects of company operations in ways that legacy communication platforms were not originally designed to handle. Emergence Capital, meanwhile, sees the shift as part of a broader transformation in how companies decide which work should be handled by people and which can increasingly be delegated to AI.
The platform is already being used by teams across a dozen countries, including companies in software, real estate and financial services. Ando’s own team has worked exclusively inside the platform since January, with agents participating in engineering, research, product, operations, sales and other areas of the business. The company is now making the product available to more teams as it looks to prove that messaging built specifically for a mixed workforce of humans and AI can become a new category of workplace software.
The bigger question is whether companies will actually want AI agents to become persistent members of their teams rather than increasingly sophisticated tools. If they do, the communication infrastructure around them may need to change as well. Ando is betting that the messaging layer will be one of the first places where that transformation becomes visible, and that the workplace of the future will not simply be humans using AI, but humans and agents working together inside the same organizational system.
