Klaviyo, a publicly traded e-commerce marketing automation company, has reached an agreement to acquire Agency, an AI-focused customer success startup founded by experienced entrepreneur Elias Torres three years ago. The specifics of the acquisition deal were not revealed.

Established in 2023, Agency had garnered $32 million in funding from various investors, including Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis before the acquisition took place.

As a result of this agreement, Torres (depicted left) will step into the role of chief product officer at Klaviyo, overseeing Agency’s team of 25 to expedite the growth and development of Klaviyo’s AI tools: Composer, which creates marketing initiatives, and Customer Agent, responsible for post-sale assistance such as returns and order tracking.

“Elias and the team have created an excellent product with Agency,” shared Klaviyo co-founder and CEO Andrew Bialecki (shown right) in a statement to TechCrunch. “We intend to integrate that with our agent products and aim to deliver this to 200,000 businesses — and ideally to millions more within the next few years.”

For Torres, joining Klaviyo represents a full-circle moment in his career. Familiar with M&A ventures, he co-founded Performable (which was acquired by HubSpot in 2011) and later Drift, where he functioned as CTO for eight years until its $1.2 billion acquisition by Vista Equity in 2021.

In 2010 at Performable, Torres recruited Bialecki, who had completed his degree at Harvard just two years prior, as one of the first engineers of that startup. Torres guided Bialecki through the nuances of early-stage startup operations. “He absorbed it in a very short period,” Torres reminisced about their collaborative experience.

Bialecki co-founded Klaviyo, initially self-funding it, soon after departing from Performable. When Klaviyo secured its first external funding in 2015, Bialecki invited Torres to invest in the seed round as an angel backer.
Klaviyo subsequently achieved a significant IPO in September 2023, valued at $9.2 billion.

Despite Klaviyo’s stock facing challenges like other SaaS enterprises, Torres and Bialecki are confident that the platform’s years of accumulated customer data provide its AI agents with a competitive edge over rivals like Decagon and Sierra.

“Elias and I came together on the vision of providing agents for businesses that they can offer to their customers,” Bialecki stated, expressing enthusiasm to collaborate with Torres once again, just as they did at the onset of the cloud era. “This is the next major technology revolution: agents. Let’s reunite and build.”