Ando has launched a team messaging platform designed for humans and AI agents to work together in shared conversations. Founded by Sara Du, the startup aims to remove the need for employees to relay agents’ work manually, arguing that existing tools such as Slack and Teams treat agents as add-on applications rather than team participants.

The platform gives agents their own identities and inboxes, and supports channels, direct messages, group chats and transcribed live calls. Agents can choose which conversations to join, participate without being tagged and alert human colleagues independently; Ando has raised $20 million in pre-seed and seed funding from Accel, Index Ventures and Emergence, but faces strong competition from Slack, Microsoft Teams and newer rivals such as Buzz.