Klaviyo, a publicly traded e-commerce marketing automation platform, has agreed to acquire Agency, a three-year-old AI-powered customer success startup founded by serial entrepreneur Elias Torres. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Agency, founded in 2023, had raised $32 million from investors including Sequoia, Menlo Ventures and Felicis before the acquisition.
As part of the deal, Torres (pictured left) will join Klaviyo as chief product officer, leading the agency’s 25-person team and accelerating the development and expansion of Klaviyo’s AI agents: Composer, which builds marketing campaigns, and Customer Agent, which handles post-sales support such as returns and order tracking.
“Elias and the team have built a great product with Agency,” Klaviyo co-founder and CEO Andrew Bialecki (pictured right) told TechCrunch. “We’re combining this with our agent product to bring it to 200,000 companies and hopefully millions more over the next few years.”
For Torres, joining Klaviyo will bring his career full circle. He co-founded Performable (acquired by HubSpot in 2011) and then Drift, where he served as CTO for eight years before selling it to Vista Equity in 2021 for $1.2 billion.
Back in 2010, at Performable, Torres hired Bialecki, a Harvard graduate, as one of the startup’s first engineers two years earlier. Torres coached Bialecki on the dynamics of early-stage startups. “He picked it up in a short amount of time,” Torres recalled of their time working together.
Bialecki co-founded Klaviyo, which he initially launched on his own, shortly after leaving Performable. When Klaviyo first raised outside capital in 2015, Bialecki invited Torres to support the seed round as an angel investor.
Klaviyo completed a high-profile IPO in September 2023 at a valuation of $9.2 billion.
Klaviyo’s stock price has taken a hit like other SaaS companies, but Torres and Bialecki believe the platform’s years of customer data give its AI agents an edge over competitors like Decagon and Sierra.
“Elias and I were united in our mission of how to provide the agents that businesses can provide to their customers,” Bialecki said, adding that he is excited to work with Torres again, as he did in the early days of the cloud era. “This is the next Big Tech revolution. Agents. Let’s get the band back together and let’s build.”
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