Klaviyo to acquire Elias Torres' Agency in a full-circle reunion for the founders

Klaviyo has agreed to buy Agency, a three-year-old AI-powered customer success startup founded by Elias Torres, according to TechCrunch. The financial terms were not disclosed.

Agency was founded in 2023 and had raised $32 million from Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis before the acquisition. As part of the deal, Torres will join Klaviyo as chief product officer and lead Agency's 25-person team. Klaviyo says the acquisition will help accelerate development of its AI agents: Composer, which builds marketing campaigns, and Customer Agent, which handles post-sale support like returns and order tracking.

The deal brings Torres back together with Klaviyo co-founder and CEO Andrew Bialecki. In 2010, Torres hired Bialecki, then two years out of Harvard, as one of the first engineers at Performable. Performable was later acquired by HubSpot in 2011. Torres went on to co-found Drift and spent eight years as CTO before Vista Equity bought the company for $1.2 billion in 2021. After Performable, Bialecki co-founded Klaviyo and bootstrapped it. When Klaviyo raised its first outside capital in 2015, Bialecki invited Torres to invest in the seed round as an angel. Klaviyo went public in September 2023 at a $9.2 billion valuation.

Klaviyo's stock has dropped along with other SaaS companies, but Torres and Bialecki believe the platform's years of customer data give its AI agents an advantage over rivals such as Decagon and Sierra. Bialecki said they are aligned on the mission of giving businesses agents to offer their customers, and he is excited to work with Torres again.