San Francisco-based Ando Raises $4M Seed to Modernize Hourly Work
San Francisco-based Ando has raised $4 million in seed financing to build what it describes as the world’s first AI infrastructure for the global hourly workforce. The round was led by Slow Ventures, with participation from Blitzscaling Ventures, Zero Capital, Monochrome, Gaingels, Mana Ventures, Fireroad, and others. Ando aims to modernize workforce scheduling by using AI-driven demand forecasting and intelligent labor allocation to reduce turnover, improve staffing accuracy, and increase revenue.
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 12, 2026 — Ando, the company building the world’s first AI infrastructure for the global hourly workforce, today announced it has raised $4M in seed financing. The round was led by Slow Ventures, with participation from Blitzscaling Ventures, Zero Capital, Monochrome, Gaingels, Mana Ventures, Fireroad, and additional investors. The new capital will be used to expand Ando’s AI forecasting and scheduling platform and scale deployments with enterprise customers.
Hourly work powers a huge part of the economy, but the systems behind staffing and scheduling are still unreliable. In the United States alone, there are about 80 million hourly workers logging about 146 billion hours of work each year. Too often, staffing does not match real demand, schedules change at the last minute, and workers end up juggling impossible tradeoffs between shifts, childcare, school pickup, commutes, and second jobs. This breakdown is expensive and exhausting for everyone involved. Turnover in hourly roles regularly is around 150%, and every time an employee leaves, businesses can lose more than $5,800 in replacement and training costs. Stores can lose $5,000 or more per week simply because they do not have the staff they need when customers walk in. In urgent hiring situations in restaurants, there is about a 40% chance a worker does not make it past 72 hours.
Ando exists to fix this system that is failing both sides. Ando corrects the daily mismatch between people, schedules, and demand by using AI to forecast demand for each location, then helps teams build schedules that fit real people. That means taking into account not just basic availability, but the preferences and constraints that decide whether someone can stay in the job, like how many hours they need, school schedules, or another job.
Ando has been serving enterprise customers for over a year and has demonstrated early traction. The platform has delivered more than 90% demand accuracy on a daily basis. The company’s roadmap includes forecasting and scheduling at 15-minute increments. To date, Ando has seen 100% conversion from customer presentation to pilot to paid platform, with 100% retention. In some locations, customers have experienced $60,000 to $80,000 in incremental revenue, though results vary by operator and are not solely attributable to Ando.
“Most people assume workers hold one steady job, but that is not reality for a large share of hourly restaurant workers. When accounting for all types of earning, seasonal stacking, and income volatility over time, the share relying on multiple income streams is likely closer to 25–40%, especially in dense urban markets. When your life depends on stitching together two or three schedules, a last-minute change is not a nuisance – it can disrupt childcare, transportation, and shifts you are already committed to. Yet most scheduling tools still ignore that reality. At Ando, we are building work schedules people can actually plan around, with fewer surprises for workers, fewer staffing scrambles for managers, and a more stable day-to-day that treats workers’ time with the same seriousness as costs and operations,” said Paul Wellons, Founder and CEO of Ando.
“Labor is one of the largest and least modernized systems in the economy,” added Sam Lessin, General Partner at lead investor Slow Ventures. “The combination of an increasingly flexible labor force and AI that continues to improve have created a compelling opportunity to modernize these systems. We think Ando is building the foundational infrastructure for how hourly work will operate in the future through their first-principles, AI-native approach to predictive demand and labor allocation.”
As part of its ongoing efforts to modernize hourly work, Ando continues to be supported by its advisory group of leaders across hospitality, technology, and labor policy. Advisors include Niren Chaudhary, former Chairman and CEO of Panera Brands and former COO and President of Krispy Kreme, Jim Messina, CEO of The Messina Group and former White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Loni Mahanta, Chief Legal and Corporate Affairs Officer at HopSkipDrive and former Vice President of Future of Work at Lyft, Andy Mutz, Global CTO of Customer Experience at Microsoft and former technology executive at SAP and Salesforce, and Adam Sah, an early Google engineering leader, multiple patent inventor, and investor with experience across three IPOs.
About Ando
Ando is building the world’s first AI infrastructure for the global hourly workforce, addressing one of the largest challenges in the hourly economy: matching the right people to the right shifts at the right time. By providing highly accurate demand forecasting and intelligent staffing tools, Ando helps businesses reduce turnover, eliminate labor waste, and give workers schedules they can depend on. Ando is purpose-built for the hourly W2 workforce, supporting employees and the managers who schedule them.
