Klaviyo, the publicly traded e-commerce marketing automation platform, has announced its agreement to acquire Agency, an AI-powered customer success startup founded three years ago by renowned serial entrepreneur Elias Torres. The financial terms of this acquisition were not disclosed.
Established in 2023, Agency had successfully secured $32 million in funding from prominent investors, including Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis, prior to its acquisition.
Under the terms of the deal, Torres will assume the role of Chief Product Officer (CPO) at Klaviyo. He will lead Agency’s 25-person team, with a strategic focus on accelerating the development and expanding the capabilities of Klaviyo’s existing AI agents: Composer, designed for crafting marketing campaigns, and Customer Agent, which manages post-sale support functions such as returns and order tracking.
Andrew Bialecki, co-founder and CEO of Klaviyo, shared his enthusiasm with TechCrunch, stating, “Elias and the team built a great product with Agency. We’re going to take that and combine it with our agent products and try to bring that to 200,000 businesses—and hopefully to millions more over the next couple of years.”
For Torres, this move to Klaviyo represents a significant full circle moment in his distinguished career. He boasts a strong track record of successful M&A exits, having co-founded Performable, which was acquired by HubSpot in 2011, and later Drift, where he served as CTO for eight years until its $1.2 billion sale to Vista Equity in 2021.
The professional relationship between Torres and Bialecki dates back to 2010 when Torres, then at Performable, hired Bialecki, a recent Harvard graduate, as one of the startup's inaugural engineers. Torres played a pivotal role in mentoring Bialecki on the intricacies of early-stage startup dynamics. Torres fondly recalled their time together, noting, “He soaked it up in a short amount of time.”
Shortly after his departure from Performable, Bialecki co-founded Klaviyo, initially bootstrapping the venture. In 2015, when Klaviyo sought its first external capital, Bialecki extended an invitation to Torres to invest in the seed round as an angel investor. Klaviyo subsequently achieved a high-profile initial public offering in September 2023, reaching a valuation of $9.2 billion.
Despite a recent downturn in Klaviyo’s stock, mirroring trends across the SaaS industry, both Torres and Bialecki are confident that the platform’s extensive history of customer data provides its AI agents with a distinct competitive advantage over rivals such as Decagon and Sierra.
Bialecki emphasized their shared vision, stating, “Elias and I coalesced on the mission of how we provide agents for businesses that they can give to their customers.” He expressed excitement about collaborating with Torres once more, likening it to their work at the dawn of the cloud era. “It’s the next big tech revolution: agents. Let’s get the band back together, and let’s go build,” Bialecki concluded.
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