Personal AI agents like Instinct and Muse have promised to handle the hassle of securing hot restaurant tables, Broadway show tickets, and sports event passes. Now, a startup has emerged from stealth mode to offer similar services for the corporate entertainment sector: company events, group dining, catering, and sports ticketing.

Ande was founded nearly three years ago. Its CEO, Rohit Sarma, says the company's AI agent can help businesses arrange various activities for employees or clients, managing everything from venue reservations to expense reimbursements. Clients include Cloudflare, Salesforce, and McGraw Hill.

The New York-based startup has raised over $52 million in combined seed and Series A funding, with investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Duration Ventures, Sierra Ventures, and Bain Capital Ventures, Sarma exclusively told The Information. He declined to disclose the post-money valuation.

Sarma noted that companies organizing group dinners or sports viewing events still rely on outdated methods, contacting venues one by one to inquire about pricing and confirm availability—a tedious and time-consuming process. Ande has built an online marketplace for corporate clients, connecting them with well-known restaurants and nightlife brands like Saison and Tao Group Hospitality.

Merchants can use Ande's AI agent to handle business matching and commercial negotiations with the AI agents on the corporate client side. Sarma said Ande's AI agent leverages models from OpenAI and Anthropic at its core; the system automatically routes tasks to lower-cost models based on their complexity.

Both corporate clients and venue merchants must pay annual fees to access the marketplace and Ande's agent products, though Sarma did not disclose the fee structure. When an event booking is completed, both parties also pay an additional service fee calculated as a percentage of the total event spend.

Sarma acknowledged that this pricing model is somewhat complex, but overall costs remain significantly lower than hiring an external event agency or having staff manually handle bookings. In theory, companies could use Muse, Instinct, or SpaceX's Grok Bot to research venues, compare prices, and confirm availability, coordinating with suppliers via email and finalizing bookings after human approval—OpenAI is also developing similar capabilities.

However, Sarma believes that the complexity of corporate entertainment scenarios is beyond what current personal AI agents can handle. Much critical information, such as pricing and venue availability windows, is not publicly available online and requires extensive communication and coordination with venue staff.