Ando, a startup building AI infrastructure for hourly work, has raised a $4 million seed round to expand its demand-forecasting and scheduling platform and scale deployments with enterprise customers. The financing was led by Slow Ventures, with participation from Blitzscaling Ventures, Zero Capital, Monochrome, Gaingels, Mana Ventures, Fireroad, and additional investors.
The company is positioning its software to reduce the day-to-day volatility that characterizes many hourly jobs, where staffing levels often do not match real-time demand, and schedules can change with little notice. Ando argues that these mismatches impose operational costs on employers and cascading personal disruptions on workers, especially those balancing childcare, school pickup, transportation constraints, and multiple income streams.
In the U.S. market alone, Ando cited roughly 80 million hourly workers logging about 146 billion hours annually. The company also pointed to high churn in hourly roles, estimating turnover at around 150%, with replacement and training costs exceeding $5,800 per departing employee. For frontline operators, it said understaffing can translate into meaningful weekly revenue leakage, and that urgent restaurant hiring can lead to substantial early attrition within the first few days.
Ando says its approach focuses on forecasting demand at each location and translating those forecasts into schedules that reflect not only basic availability but also worker preferences and constraints that influence retention and reliability. The company reported serving enterprise customers for more than a year and said it has achieved more than 90% daily demand accuracy, with plans to move toward 15-minute forecasting and scheduling. It also reported a 100% conversion rate from customer presentation to pilot to paid platform and 100% retention to date, while noting that financial outcomes vary by operator and are not solely attributable to Ando.
The company also highlighted an advisory group spanning hospitality, technology, and labor policy, including former and current executives from Panera Brands, Krispy Kreme, HopSkipDrive, Lyft, Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce, and Google, as well as political and policy leadership experience.
KEY QUOTES:
“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.”
Paul Wellons, Founder And CEO, Ando
“Labor is one of the largest and least modernized systems in the economy. 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.”
Sam Lessin, General Partner, Slow Ventures
