Ando wants to take on Slack with a team messaging app that lets humans and agents work together
Ando has raised $20 million in pre-seed and seed funding from investors including Accel, Index Ventures and Emergence.
Sara Du, a former engineer, noticed that AI agents were being treated like separate apps within popular communication platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams. This "meat proxy" issue, as Du calls it, involved humans acting as messengers between agents and their teams. Du believed that AI agents should be integrated into shared team conversations, allowing them to understand decisions, ask questions, and collaborate with other agents or humans as needed.
To address this, Du founded Ando, a team messaging platform designed for both human and AI workers. Ando aims to replace traditional messaging apps and offers agents their own identities, inboxes, and the ability to participate in conversations like any other team member. The app includes channels, direct messages, group conversations, and live calls that can be transcribed and viewed by agents.
Agents can join conversations without being tagged, and if an agent identifies a need for a human's input, it can message them directly. Ando has secured $20 million in pre-seed and seed funding from investors such as Accel, Index Ventures, and Emergence to continue developing the platform. Despite being a relatively new entrant in the crowded workplace communication market, Ando holds the potential to revolutionize how companies manage their AI agents and human employees, especially for smaller teams that could benefit from the automation of execution, research, and coordination tasks.
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