Klaviyo acquires Elias Torres’ Agency to boost AI agents

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. Financial terms were not disclosed, but Agency had raised $32 million from investors including Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis. As part of the deal, Torres will join Klaviyo as chief product officer, leading Agency's 25-person team to accelerate Klaviyo's AI agents: Composer, which builds marketing campaigns, and Customer Agent, which handles post-sale support like returns and order tracking. Klaviyo CEO Andrew Bialecki called the acquisition an opportunity to combine Agency's product with Klaviyo's existing agent technology and bring it to 200,000 businesses, with hopes of reaching millions more.

The acquisition is a full-circle moment for Torres and Bialecki, who first worked together in 2010 when Torres hired Bialecki as one of the first engineers at Performable, a startup later acquired by HubSpot. Bialecki went on to co-found Klaviyo, and Torres participated as an angel investor in its 2015 seed round. Klaviyo went public in September 2023 at a $9.2 billion valuation. Torres also co-founded Drift, serving as CTO for eight years until its $1.2 billion sale to Vista Equity in 2021. Both founders see Klaviyo's years of accumulated customer data as a key advantage for its AI agents over competitors like Decagon and Sierra. Torres described the move as "the next Big Tech revolution: agents," adding, "Let's get the band back together, and let's go build."