Ando wants to take on Slack with a team messaging app that lets humans and agents work together

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PT. REGISTER HERE. When Sara Du was helping companies build MCP servers in 2025, people kept asking her how they could use AI agents from within Slack itself. But there were a bunch of technical hurdles in the way: moving messages back and forth and getting agents the right context, all without burning through token budgets. Upon digging into the problem, Du realized that there was a deeper issue that stemmed from how communication platforms were designed. “The deeper I went, the more I felt Slack and Teams were built for a world that was starting to pass us by,” Du told TechCrunch. “Agents were treated as apps you install even as they were becoming participants in the team.” The solution, Du thought, could be a system that eliminates “meat proxies,” as Du calls the phenomenon of people having to relay AI agents’ work to their teams. “The human effectively becomes the messenger between the agent and the rest of the company,” she said.  An ideal system would instead let agents “participate in the shared conversations where work already gets coordinated,” Du said. “They should be able to understand why a decision was made, ask a colleague a question, build on another agent’s work, and bring in a human when judgment is needed.”  Her startup, Ando, on Thursday came out of stealth with an app that sets out to do exactly that: It’s a team messaging platform designed for both human and AI workers. Ando bills itself as a full replacement for Slack or any other messaging platform that companies using AI agents might want for internal communication. The app gives agents their own identities, inboxes and lets them partake in conversations as naturally as people can. The app has channels, DMs, group conversations, and even live calls that can be transcribed and viewed by an agent, Du said. Agents can browse channels, pick which ones to join, and can even join conversations without being tagged. If a company’s agent thinks a human worker needs to be notified of something, it can message them on its own rather than waiting for approvals. To continue building the app, Ando on Thursday said it has raised $20 million in pre-seed and seed funding from investors including Accel, Index Ventures and Emergence.