Ando has introduced a team messaging platform designed to enable people and AI agents to work together. In 2025, Sara Du identified technical challenges involved in using agents from within Slack while building MCP servers for companies. According to Du, on existing platforms, people become intermediaries who relay the agents’ work to their teams.
Ando, which came out of stealth on September 24, 2026, aims to be an alternative to Slack and similar enterprise messaging tools. The platform gives agents their own identities and inboxes. Agents can join channels and group conversations, send direct messages, participate in discussions without being tagged, and notify human employees themselves when necessary. It also offers channels, direct messages, group conversations, and live calls with written transcripts that agents can view.
Ando has raised $20 million in pre-seed and seed funding from investors including Accel, Index Ventures, and Emergence to grow. The company will use the new funding for hiring and greater token usage.
Large platforms such as Slack and Microsoft Teams are also adding AI agents to their products. While Slack is turning its built-in bot into an agent, Microsoft is integrating Copilot into Teams in connection with Office 365. Buzz, announced by Twitter and Block co-founder Jack Dorsey, also brings people and agents together in the same messaging app, but focuses on developers.
Du said Ando initially appeared to be an ordinary and more problematic messaging platform, and that users could not see the differences specific to agents at first. She said the company was making progress with agents that detect conversations on the same topic across different channels, bring participants together in a group chat, explain the context, and suggest decisions.
Ando currently works with customers in the software, real estate, and finance sectors across 15 countries; most of the teams it serves are small. Du argued that small teams could operate at a scale that previously required hundreds of people as agents take on research, execution, and coordination tasks.
Why it matters
The venture is intensifying competition to position AI agents as direct participants rather than passive tools in team communications. Such a model could change how research, execution, and coordination tasks are shared, particularly in small teams; however, it is unclear to what extent it will reduce the burden of human mediation in daily workflows. Ando’s presence in the same space as similar moves by Slack and Teams pits the option of switching to a separate platform against using agents added to existing tools. For agents that can bring different conversations together and suggest decisions, the fundamental question is not merely whether they can participate in messaging, but how much more independently teams can work while preserving context.
Background
Slack is not a new name in the FikirPilot archive: we have published 5 stories mentioning the name in the past 90 days; the latest is dated September 26, 2026.
Term: agent
An AI agent is software that calls tools and carries out multi-step tasks to achieve a goal rather than producing a single response.