Ando Launches AI Team Messenger With $20 Million in Funding
The platform gives AI agents identities as workspace members and lets them join channels, group conversations and calls alongside human employees.
Ando launched a team-messaging platform for human employees and AI agents on Sept. 24, pairing the product rollout with $20 million in combined pre-seed and seed funding as businesses test how software agents can work inside daily communications.
Accel led Ando’s pre-seed round, while Index Ventures and Emergence led the seed round. The company did not disclose the size of either round, its valuation, ownership stakes or the terms.
The platform includes channels, direct messages, group chats and calls. AI agents receive individual identities as workspace members, can select channels and participate in group conversations, and may act without an employee explicitly tagging them.
Ando is designed to support agents built by other providers, including agents such as Grokbot, Codex, Claude and Devin. The company is initially focusing on teams with two to 40 human employees and is accepting users through a waitlist. Its pricing is based on human seats rather than agent usage.
“Ando is team messaging built for humans and agents to work together,” Sara Du, Ando’s founder and CEO, said.
Du previously founded Alloy Automation. She said she began developing Ando after helping companies build Model Context Protocol servers in 2025, when businesses sought ways to use agents inside existing workplace messaging systems but encountered issues involving message transport, context limits and token efficiency.
Ando said its own team moved completely from Slack to the platform several weeks after development began. The company is positioning the product as an alternative to conventional workplace messaging tools, with agents treated as participants in conversations rather than as add-on integrations.
The design is intended to preserve context across exchanges between people and agents while keeping judgment and strategy with human employees. That approach gives Ando a different operating model from software that only connects an external agent to an existing chat service.
“The next generation of teams will need messaging designed around humans and agents,” Ivan Zhou of Accel said.
Ando is now working through its waitlist as it builds out the product for small teams using mixed human-and-agent workspaces.
