Ando launches an AI-native rival to Slack

When Sara Du was helping companies build MCP servers in 2025, she kept hearing the same question: how could teams use AI agents from within Slack itself. The technical hurdles were real — moving messages back and forth and giving agents the right context, without burning through token budgets. Digging into the problem, Du concluded the deeper issue was how communication platforms were designed in the first place: agents were treated as apps to install even as they were becoming participants on the team. She wanted to eliminate what she calls “meat proxies” — the pattern of a person having to relay an AI agent’s work to the rest of the team, effectively becoming the messenger between the agent and the company.

Her startup, Ando, came out of stealth on Thursday with an app built as a full replacement for Slack or any other internal messaging platform, designed for both human and AI workers. The app gives agents their own identities and inboxes and lets them take part in conversations as naturally as people can, with channels, DMs, group conversations, and live calls that can be transcribed and viewed by an agent. Agents can browse channels, choose which ones to join, and can join conversations without being tagged; if an agent judges that a human needs to be notified of something, it can message that person directly rather than waiting for approval.

To keep building the app, Ando on Thursday also said it has raised $20 million in pre-seed and seed funding from investors including Accel, Index Ventures, and Emergence.

Du isn’t alone in pursuing this idea. Slack has turned its native bot into an AI agent, and Microsoft has built Copilot deeply into Teams and the rest of Office 365. Twitter and Block co-founder Jack Dorsey announced a similar app, Buzz, a few months ago, though it leans more toward developers. Du said adoption was slow at first — early users found the experience underwhelming, more like a clunkier messaging app, before they saw what set the agents apart — but usage grew as customers kept coming back, and she began noticing agents doing more than expected, such as spotting two separate channels discussing the same problem and pulling everyone into one conversation with context and a suggested decision. Ando says it now works with customers in software, real estate, and finance across 15 countries, though many of the teams it serves are still small. The new funding will go toward hiring and further token spend.

Why it matters

Ando is betting that as AI agents multiply inside companies, messaging tools built only for humans become a bottleneck, and that a small team backed by capable agents can take on coordination and execution work that previously required a much larger headcount.