Ando wants to take on Slack with a team messaging app that lets humans and agents work together

Du also feels there’s still enough of an advantage in building an AI-agent-native team messaging platform as legacy incumbents try to figure out how to pivot their existing software. 

Regardless, she seems to understand that Ando has an uphill battle ahead of it, and said that things were slow in the beginning. “A lot of people we showed it to early on were understandably unimpressed. It was, in many respects, just a jankier messaging platform. People would get stuck on that before they even got to what was different about the agents,” she explained.

But she said her team knew they were onto something when more and more customers started using Ando for longer periods. With Ando, she started to see that agents could do more than people expect: An agent could notice two conversations being held in different channels about the same problem, and without being asked to, could bring everyone together in a group chat, explain the context, and even suggest a decision. 

“That was really delightful for me,” she said, “I felt agents could better manage people than humans can because they can process a lot more messages than a human can in a shorter span of time.” 

She said Ando is currently working with customers in software, real estate and finance across 15 countries, though many of the teams it serves right now are small. The fresh capital will be used to hire more people and burn through more tokens, she said. 

“I think agents will let very small teams operate at a scale that previously required hundreds of people,” she said. “They can take on more of the execution, research and coordination work, while humans spend more of their time on judgment, strategy and deciding what should happen next.”