Klaviyo acquires Elias Torres’ Agency in full-circle reunion for tech founders
Klaviyo, the 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 were not disclosed, but the deal reunites Torres with Klaviyo co-founder and chief executive Andrew Bialecki, who worked under Torres as one of his first hires at Performable back in 2010. Torres will join Klaviyo as chief product officer, bringing Agency's 25-person team to help expand the company's AI agent products.
Founded in 2023, Agency had raised $32 million from investors including Sequoia, Menlo Ventures and Felicis before the acquisition. Torres's team will work on accelerating Klaviyo's AI agents, Composer and Customer Agent, which the company hopes to roll out to its roughly 200,000 business customers and beyond. Torres has previous exit experience, having co-founded Performable (acquired by HubSpot in 2011) and later served as chief technology officer at Drift until its $1.2 billion sale to Vista Equity in 2021; he also backed Klaviyo's 2015 seed round as an angel investor before its $9.2 billion IPO in September 2023.
- Klaviyo acquires Elias Torres's AI startup Agency; terms undisclosed
- Torres becomes Klaviyo's chief product officer, reuniting with CEO Bialecki
- Agency's 25-person team will boost Klaviyo's AI agent products
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Klaviyo is a publicly listed company that makes marketing software used by online retailers to manage things like email and text campaigns. It has agreed to buy Agency, a smaller startup that builds AI tools for customer support, in a deal whose value has not been made public.
The link between the two companies is personal as well as commercial. Agency's founder, Elias Torres, previously employed Klaviyo's own chief executive, Andrew Bialecki, early in his career, and Torres also invested in Klaviyo years before it became a large public company. Torres is now set to take on a senior product role at Klaviyo, bringing his roughly 25-person team with him.
The deal matters because it reflects a wider push by software companies to build AI systems, often called "agents," that can handle tasks like customer queries automatically. Klaviyo serves around 200,000 business customers, so folding in Agency's technology and team is intended to speed up development of these AI features across its platform.