Klaviyo acquires Elias Torres-founded AI startup Agency; founder becomes chief product officer

Klaviyo, a publicly listed e-commerce marketing automation platform, has reached an agreement to acquire Agency, a three-year-old AI-powered customer success startup founded by serial entrepreneur Elias Torres. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Agency was founded in 2023 and had raised $32 million from investors including Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis before the acquisition. Under the agreement, Torres will join Klaviyo as chief product officer, leading Agency's 25-person team to accelerate the development and expansion of Klaviyo's AI agents: Composer, which builds marketing campaigns, and Customer Agent, which handles post-sale support such as returns and order tracking.

Klaviyo co-founder and CEO Andrew Bialecki told TechCrunch that Elias and his team built a great product with Agency, and the company plans to combine it with its own agent products to bring the offering to 200,000 businesses, and hopefully millions more in the coming years.

For Torres, joining Klaviyo brings his career full circle. He previously co-founded Performable, which was acquired by HubSpot in 2011, and later Drift, where he served as CTO for eight years until the company's $1.2 billion sale to Vista Equity in 2021. Back in 2010 at Performable, Torres hired Bialecki, who had graduated from Harvard two years earlier, as one of the startup's first engineers. Torres mentored Bialecki on early-stage startup dynamics.

Bialecki co-founded Klaviyo shortly after leaving Performable, initially bootstrapping the company. When Klaviyo raised its first outside capital in 2015, Bialecki invited Torres to back the seed round as an angel investor. Klaviyo later completed a high-profile IPO in September 2023 at a $9.2 billion valuation.

While Klaviyo's stock has taken a hit along with other SaaS companies, Torres and Bialecki believe the platform's years of customer data give its AI agents an advantage over competitors like Decagon and Sierra. Bialecki said that he and Elias converged on the mission of providing businesses with agents they can give to their customers, and he is excited to work with Torres again as they did at the beginning of the cloud era. "It's the next big tech revolution: agents," Bialecki said. "Let's get the band back together, and let's go build."