A startup led by Sara Du is building a team messaging app, Ando, designed to replace traditional messaging platforms by enabling both humans and AI agents to participate in conversations in Slack-like environments.

The core goal is to let AI agents access context, understand decisions, ask questions, build on others’ work, and bring in humans when judgment is needed, all without using humans as go-betweens.

Customers across software, real estate, and finance in 15 countries are already using Ando, with early users reporting that agents consolidate conversations and coordinate actions across channels.

Ando provides agents with identities, inboxes, and the ability to join channels, DMs, group chats, and live-call transcripts, enabling autonomous agent action and human notification without intermediaries.

Ando has raised $20 million in pre-seed and seed funding from Accel, Index Ventures, and Emergence to push development, including token usage, signaling strong investor support for AI-native collaboration tools.

Founder Sara Du acknowledges an uphill path due to early skepticism but notes growing adoption as agents demonstrate the ability to coordinate multiple conversations and bring teams together to explain context and proposed decisions.

The app is positioned as a full replacement for Slack for organizations seeking integrated human-agent collaboration, leveraging agents to handle execution, research, and coordination at scale while humans focus on judgment and strategy.

Du contends that incumbents like Slack and Teams have limitations for AI agents, leaving a sizable market opportunity for a native AI-agent team messaging platform.