Our Investment in Ando: Modern Messaging for Teams and Agents
Today, we announced our investment in Ando, a team messaging platform built for humans and AI agents to work together.
Over the past decade, products like Slack and Teams have shaped how people coordinate at work. Channels, DMs, and group chats have become familiar building blocks for enterprise collaboration, and in a world centered on human-to-human communication, they have worked remarkably well.
But the nature of work is changing.
AI agents are becoming increasingly capable partners across software development, customer support, legal, finance, and many other functions. Unlike humans, agents can process large amounts of context, retrieve information on demand, operate independently 24/7, and work in parallel at scale. Today, most of our interactions with agents remain limited, happening inside individual apps or one-to-one conversations. However, as AI-native work becomes more multiplayer, coordinating context, memory, and activity across a growing number of agents becomes exponentially harder.
Ando is building a new messaging product for that world. Humans and agents work side by side, with agents participating in conversations and taking action while respecting the same boundaries you would expect from human teammates. Instead of working with agents across a growing collection of isolated apps, teams can collaborate with them in one shared environment where context carries across conversations. That shared context becomes more valuable over time. Every interaction helps the system better understand the team, making the agents in a workspace more aligned and more proactive. And because Ando is designed to work across different agents and functions, its value grows as teams bring more AI into their workflows. A more complex agent stack only makes this common collaboration layer more important.
Founded by Sara Du, Ando is crafted with exceptional design taste and a deep understanding of human behavior. This is Sara’s second company, after previously founding Alloy Automation as a Thiel Fellow to solve similar problems across workflow automation and integrations in ecommerce. Sara has a rare combination of creative instincts and grounded execution, and is exactly the right person to help shape how we work with AI.
Ando is now opening up to more teams and announcing its pre-seed round led by Accel and seed round led by Index and Emergence. TechCrunch covered the news exclusively here, and the team shared more about what this funding means here.
We’re looking forward to partnering with Sara and the Ando team as they redefine how humans and agents work together. If you’re interested in building at the frontier of human-computer interaction, they’re hiring!
