Ando wants to take on Slack with a team messaging app that lets humans and agents work together
- ID
- 28137
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 24 Sep 2026, 10:31 PM
- Fetched
- 25 Sep 2026, 5:29 AM
- Provider
- TechCrunch
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/24/ando-eyes-slack-as-it-builds-team-messaging-platform-for-humans-and-agents-to-work-together/
- Source URL
- https://techcrunch.com/feed/
Summary
- Score
- 4.5
- Created
- 25 Sep 2026, 5:30 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersai_agent_userssaas_founders
What happened
Ando, a startup founded by Sara Du, came out of stealth with a team messaging app pitched as a full replacement for Slack or Teams, built so AI agents and humans share the same conversations. Agents get their own identities and inboxes, can browse and choose channels to join, take part in channels, DMs and group chats, and sit in live calls that are transcribed for them. Du frames the problem as "meat proxies" — people relaying agent work to teammates — after working with companies building MCP servers in 2025 who wanted agents usable from inside Slack but hit hurdles around message movement, context, and token budgets.
Why it matters
This is a positioning bet, not a shipped benchmark: no pricing, funding amount, customer count, or context-handling detail is given, so nothing here forces a change to your stack today. If you run agents in Slack, the concrete thing to watch is the design claim — agents as participants with identities and inboxes rather than installed apps — because it implies per-agent seat cost, agent-readable transcripts of calls, and an audit surface for agent actions, all of which you would have to pay for and govern separately from your current Slack plan.
Discussion angle
If agents become first-class participants in team chat, who owns the seat, the permissions, and the transcript retention — and would your team actually move off Slack for that, or just bolt agents onto it?