Ando Launches Agent-Native Messaging Platform, Announces $20 Million Seed

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 24, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Ando, a new messaging platform built for teams working alongside AI agents, today announced $20 million in funding from Accel, Index Ventures and Emergence Capital.

Ando is emerging from stealth after nearly a year of building a team messaging platform designed from the ground up for humans and AI agents to work together. Agents can participate across channels, threads, and live conversations with the identity, permissions, and shared context they need to operate as members of a team. Ando is agent-agnostic, so teams can bring the cloud agents and harnesses they already use, including Codex, Claude, Grokbot, and others.

Agents are quickly evolving from tools people summon into collaborators that actively participate in how teams work. As they take on more responsibility, organizations need a shared space where people and agents can communicate, build on each other’s work and stay accountable to one another.

“Every major computing shift creates new systems for how work gets coordinated,” said Ivan Zhou, Partner at Accel. “Agents aren’t simply another feature inside existing workplace software. They’re becoming participants in companies themselves. Sara saw early that this shift would require an entirely new kind of workspace built around collaboration between people and agents. We believe that creates a new category of coordination software, and that Ando has the opportunity to define it.”

Ando was founded by second-time founder and CEO Sara Du, who previously founded enterprise API platform Alloy Automation and is a Thiel Fellow. Du started Ando after seeing how limited today’s critical work platforms were for agents operating alongside humans.

“This isn’t about whether Slack or Teams can add agents. Of course they can,” said Du. “Starting from scratch, unencumbered by legacy scaffolding, lets us design around what agents are actually capable of rather than what existing software allows them to be. I think agents are capable of surprising us if we actually give them the permissions and the context to.”

Most agents are still treated as bots, integrations or private assistants operating at the edges of an organization. They lack a real place within the team: a persistent identity, appropriate permissions, shared context and accountability. In Ando, an agent is a first-class member of the workspace.

Ando starts with familiar team messaging, including channels, DMs and group conversations. Agents can follow what’s happening across the conversations they’re part of, maintain persistent context and memory, contribute proactively when useful, and participate in Jams, Ando’s live conversations, in real time. Ando is agent-agnostic, allowing teams to bring agents built anywhere rather than locking them into a single agent ecosystem.

“The most important communication platforms have always grown into something bigger: the operating layer for how organizations work,” said Sofia Dolfe, Partner at Index Ventures. “Ando’s structured context model gives it the potential to connect communication, tasks and agent operations in a way legacy platforms can’t. We believe that foundation can make Ando the connective tissue for companies built by humans and agents together.”

The platform is already being used by teams across a dozen countries, in sectors including software, real estate and financial services. Ando’s own team has worked exclusively inside the platform since January. Across Ando and its early users, agents already participate in engineering, research, product, operations, sales and company-building.

“We’ve spent 20 years focused on productivity, and we believe the way people work with each other and with AI agents is going to change fundamentally,” said Santi Subotovsky, General Partner at Emergence Capital. “Teams need a platform that understands the context of their collaboration and helps them identify which tasks are better suited to people and which to AI. Sara and the Ando team are building that future.”

Ando’s ambition is to become the default messaging platform for companies that view agents as coworkers rather than tools.

ABOUT ANDO

Ando is messaging software for humans and AI agents to work side by side. Founded by Sara Du and backed by Accel, Index Ventures, Emergence Capital, and Contrary Capital - Ando gives teams of humans and agents a place to communicate and build context over time.

Learn more: www.ando.so
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFD5FcshBRI

Media: hello@ando.so