Key facts
- Klaviyo has acquired Agency, an AI-powered customer success startup.
- Agency was founded in 2023 and had raised $32 million from investors.
- Elias Torres, founder of Agency, will join Klaviyo as chief product officer.
- Torres and Klaviyo CEO Andrew Bialecki have a history of working together.
- Torres previously co-founded Performable (acquired by HubSpot) and Drift (acquired by Vista Equity).
Klaviyo, a publicly traded e-commerce marketing automation platform, has acquired Agency, a three-year-old AI-powered customer success startup founded by Elias Torres. The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Agency, founded in 2023, had previously secured $32 million in funding from investors including Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis.
As part of the deal, Torres will join Klaviyo as its chief product officer. He will lead Agency's 25-person team to enhance Klaviyo's AI agent products, Composer and Customer Agent, which are designed for marketing campaigns and post-sale customer support, respectively.
This acquisition marks a full-circle moment for Torres, who previously co-founded Performable, which was acquired by HubSpot in 2011, and later served as CTO of Drift until its $1.2 billion sale to Vista Equity in 2021. Torres had hired Klaviyo CEO Andrew Bialecki as an engineer at Performable in 2010 and mentored him. Bialecki later angel invested in Klaviyo's seed round in 2015.
Despite recent market pressures on SaaS companies, both Torres and Bialecki believe Klaviyo's extensive customer data provides its AI agents with a competitive edge. Bialecki expressed enthusiasm for reuniting with Torres to advance what he described as the 'next big tech revolution: agents.'