Ando has officially emerged from stealth, unveiling a messaging platform built specifically for teams that collaborate with artificial intelligence agents. The San Francisco based company announced $20 million in funding from Accel, Index Ventures, and Emergence Capital. The investment marks an early bet on a new category of coordination software designed for humans and AI working side by side.
A New Kind of Workspace
Ando enters a market where most agents are still treated as bots, integrations, or private assistants operating at the edges of an organization. The platform instead gives each agent a persistent identity, appropriate permissions, shared context, and accountability. The result is a workspace where agents are first-class members of the team rather than add-ons.
Agent-Agnostic Approach
Ando is deliberately agent-agnostic, allowing teams to bring cloud agents and harnesses they already use rather than locking them into a single ecosystem. The platform supports familiar messaging features such as channels, direct messages, and group conversations. Agents can follow relevant discussions, retain long-term context, and contribute proactively when useful.
Live Collaboration With Jams
Beyond asynchronous messaging, Ando introduces Jams, a live conversation format where agents can participate in real time. This capability is designed to help humans and agents build on each other's work without the delays of traditional workflows. It also reflects the company's belief that agents can surprise teams when given the right permissions and context.
Investor Confidence
Accel partner Ivan Zhou said major computing shifts always create new systems for how work gets coordinated. He noted that agents are not simply another feature inside existing workplace software but are becoming participants in companies themselves. Index Ventures partner Sofia Dolfe added that Ando's structured context model could make it the connective tissue for companies built by humans and agents together.
Founder's Track Record and Vision
Ando was founded by Sara Du, a second-time founder and Thiel Fellow who previously built enterprise API platform Alloy Automation. Du said starting from scratch, unencumbered by legacy scaffolding, allows the team to design around what agents are actually capable of rather than what existing software allows. Her experience with enterprise automation informs the product's focus on identity, permissions, and shared context.
Early Adoption Across Sectors
Despite emerging from stealth, Ando reports that teams across a dozen countries are already using the platform 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 activities.
New Category Potential
Emergence Capital general partner Santi Subotovsky said his firm has spent 20 years focused on productivity. He believes the way people work with each other and with AI agents is going to change fundamentally. Subotovsky added that teams need a platform that understands collaboration context and helps identify which tasks are better suited to people and which to AI.
Ando's ambition is to become the default messaging platform for companies that view agents as coworkers rather than tools. With $20 million in funding and backing from Accel, Index Ventures, and Emergence Capital, the company is positioning itself at the center of a fundamental change in workplace collaboration. Its early traction suggests that the market is ready for a new coordination layer built for humans and AI together.