Klaviyo to acquire Elias Torres' AI startup Agency, founder to join as CPO

Klaviyo, a publicly traded e-commerce marketing automation company, has struck a deal to acquire Agency, a three-year-old artificial intelligence startup focused on customer success. The startup was founded in 2023 by serial entrepreneur Elias Torres. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Agency had previously raised $32 million from investors including Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis.

As part of the agreement, Torres will join Klaviyo as chief product officer and lead Agency's 25-person team. His role will involve accelerating Klaviyo's AI agent products: Composer, which creates marketing campaigns, and Customer Agent, which handles post-sale support such as returns and order tracking.

Klaviyo co-founder and CEO Andrew Bialecki said the company plans to combine Agency with its existing agent products and offer the result to its 200,000 businesses, with hopes of reaching millions more in the coming years. He praised Torres and his team for building a strong product.

For Torres, the acquisition brings his career full circle. He previously co-founded Performable, which was acquired by HubSpot in 2011, and later Drift, where he spent eight years as CTO until its $1.2 billion sale to Vista Equity in 2021. Back in 2010, while at Performable, Torres hired Bialecki—a Harvard graduate two years earlier—as one of his first engineers and mentored him. After leaving Performable, Bialecki founded Klaviyo, initially bootstrapping the company. When Klaviyo raised its first outside capital in 2015, Torres participated as an angel investor in the seed round.

Klaviyo went public in September 2023 with a $9.2 billion valuation. Although its stock has declined along with other SaaS companies, Torres and Bialecki believe Klaviyo's years of customer data give its AI agents an edge over rivals such as Decagon and Sierra. Bialecki said they share a mission of providing agents to businesses, calling it the next big tech revolution and adding, "Let's get the band back together, and let's go build."