How Vendo runs its own team on Inkbox

Vendo's engineering agent has its own identity. So do its GTM agent, its ops agent, and each founder's personal assistant agent. Five agents, five real identities: reachable over text, the same way you'd message a coworker.

Vendo is a YC-backed company building the customization layer that lets a product's users build their own features and micro-apps on top of it: within the brand, inside the guardrails. Nour and Yousef have known each other since kindergarten; they came out of Stanford and Berkeley and had already built AI shopping assistants for retailers before this. Small team, moving fast.

Like a lot of AI-native companies right now, they lean on AI agents to help run their own operations: founder assistants, plus agents for engineering, GTM, and ops. The question was how to make those agents reachable. An agent that only lives in a chat window is easy to forget, so Vendo wanted theirs living on the channels the team already uses.

On Inkbox, Yousef and Nour each got a personal-assistant agent, then dedicated teammates for Engineering, GTM, and Ops. Each one has its own mailbox, iMessage presence, phone line, and a webhook wired back into Vendo's own tooling. No stitching together email, telephony, and delivery-status plumbing five times over: one platform, one identity per agent.

The team reaches these agents the way they'd reach a coworker, and the agents hand work back through webhooks into the systems where it actually lives. They went from early tests to five role-specific agents in a short stretch, without rebuilding channel infrastructure each time.

There's a symmetry worth naming. Vendo's whole product bet is that people shouldn't have to bend themselves to their software: the software should mold to how each person works. The way they run their own company rhymes with that. Rather than force their agents into one shared chat box, they gave each one its own way to show up and participate.

Our agents can reason fine. What we needed was for them to be reachable, and to carry context across every channel. Inkbox gave each one its own identity, so they show up like actual teammates instead of another chatbot.

– Yousef, cofounder of Vendo.

Want your agents to be reachable like Vendo's? Get started in minutes or reach out to hello@inkbox.ai.