Sara Du spent 2025 helping companies build MCP servers, and she noticed something strange: people kept asking how they could use AI agents from within Slack itself. The problem wasn’t just technical. It was that Slack and similar apps were built for a world that was starting to pass them by.
Du told TechCrunch that the deeper she went, the more she felt Slack and Teams were built for a world that was starting to pass us by. “Agents were treated as apps you install even as they were becoming participants in the team,” she said. She called the phenomenon of people having to relay AI agents’ work to their teams “meat proxies.” “The human effectively becomes the messenger between the agent and the rest of the company,” she said.
The Agent Problem
At the heart of the issue is the assumption that communication platforms are built around people being the only ones who talk. Agents need to send messages, receive them, and do so with the correct context, all while keeping token costs under control. Du wanted a setup where agents could simply join in on the conversation.
Her ideal system would let agents “participate in the shared conversations where work already gets coordinated,” she 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.”
Ando’s Pitch
Thursday saw Du’s startup Ando come out of stealth with an app that tries to do exactly that. It’s unveiled as a team messaging platform built for human and AI workers alike. The platform positions itself as a complete substitute for Slack or any other messaging app that companies relying on AI agents might use for internal communication.
Agents get personal identities and inboxes through the app, letting them take part in conversations just as naturally as people do. Channels, DMs, group conversations, and live calls with transcriptions are all available for agents to use. They can move through channels, select which ones to join, and enter conversations without needing to be tagged. When a company’s agent spots something a human worker should know about, they can send that person a message directly, instead of waiting on approvals.
Funding Round
Ando said the company has raised $20 million in pre-seed and seed funding from investors including Accel, Index Ventures, and Emergence to keep building the app.
What The Competition Is Doing
Du’s idea isn’t a new one. Most of the major players in the workplace collaboration space have already built in support for AI agents. Slack has turned its native bot into an AI agent, and Microsoft has integrated Copilot into Teams in ways that tie into the rest of its Office 365 suite.
There is still room for apps to challenge the established players because AI is spreading through workplaces fast. A few months ago, Jack Dorsey, who co-founded both Twitter and Block, announced Buzz, an app that joins people with AI agents inside one messaging platform, even if it is aimed mainly at developers.
Early Customer Interest
Du sees that Ando faces a hard road ahead. She explained that “A lot of people we showed it to early on were understandably unimpressed. It was, in many respects, just a jankier messaging platform. People would get stuck on that before they even got to what was different about the agents,”.
The moment her team realized they were on to something came when more and more customers kept Ando around for extended periods. It was then that she saw agents could exceed expectations: an agent might detect two separate conversations across different channels addressing the same issue, join both parties into a single group chat without being told to, lay out the situation, and even propose a resolution.
“That was really delightful for me,” she said. “I felt agents could better manage people than humans can because they can process a lot more messages than a human can in a shorter span of time.”
Customers Today
Right now Ando is collaborating with customers in software, real estate, and finance across 15 countries, and although many of the teams it serves at the moment are small, the company is still growing. The new money raised will go toward hiring additional staff and spending more tokens, according to her.
“I think agents will let very small teams operate at a scale that previously required hundreds of people,” she said. “They can take on more of the execution, research, and coordination work, while humans spend more of their time on judgment, strategy, and deciding what should happen next.”
The Road Ahead
The point that agents are “meat proxies” is a clear-eyed remark that clears up the noise surrounding AI in chat tools. Du’s account of agents catching duplicate conversations and joining them together proves the idea has legs.
It remains to be seen whether Ando can persuade firms to abandon Slack altogether. The software must first demonstrate that it can manage the intricacies of actual work groups before users become interested in the agents. Du, however, appears confident about where her product is headed.
| Milestone | Detail |
|---|---|
| Stealth exit | Thursday, Ando comes out of stealth |
| Funding round | $20 million in pre-seed and seed funding |
| Investors | Accel, Index Ventures, Emergence |
| Competitors | Slack, Microsoft Teams, Buzz |
There’s a lot of competition in team messaging right now, but the issue Du spotted is genuine. People are taking on more roles within teams, and Du thinks the tools that act like they’re just apps will be left behind. Ando is counting on treating everyone involved as full partners to win out instead.
Source material: “Ando wants to take on Slack with a team messaging app that lets humans and agents work together,” TechCrunch.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.