Publicly traded e-commerce marketing automation platform Klaviyo has agreed to acquire Agency, a three-year-old AI-powered customer success startup founded by serial entrepreneur Elias Torres. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Agency was founded in 2023 and had raised $32 million from investors including Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis prior to the acquisition.
As part of the agreement, Elias Torres will join Klaviyo as chief product officer. He will lead Agency’s 25-person team and accelerate the development and deployment of Klaviyo’s AI agents, including Composer — which builds marketing campaigns — and Customer Agent, which handles post-sale support such as returns and order tracking.
“Elias and the team built a great product with Agency,” Klaviyo co-founder and CEO Andrew Bialecki said. “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, the move represents a continuation of a career with several M&A exits. He co-founded Performable (acquired by HubSpot in 2011) and later co-founded Drift, where he served as CTO for eight years until its $1.2 billion sale to Vista Equity in 2021.
Their professional relationship predates both companies: in 2010 at Performable, Torres hired Bialecki — who had graduated from Harvard two years earlier — as one of the startup’s first engineers and mentored him on early‑stage startup dynamics. Bialecki later co-founded Klaviyo, initially bootstrapping it; when Klaviyo raised its first outside capital in 2015, Bialecki invited Torres to participate in the seed round as an angel investor.
Klaviyo completed a high-profile IPO in September 2023, valuing the company at $9.2 billion. While Klaviyo’s stock has declined alongside other SaaS companies, Torres and Bialecki argue that Klaviyo’s years of customer data give its AI agents an advantage over competitors such as Decagon and Sierra.
Bialecki said the two founders aligned on the mission of providing agents that businesses can deliver to their customers. He added that he is excited to work with Torres again and framed the effort as part of the next wave of large tech innovation: agents.
Market implications
The acquisition signals further consolidation in AI-driven customer success and marketing automation within the e-commerce SaaS market. By integrating Agency’s technology and team, Klaviyo aims to scale its AI agent products to a broader customer base, leveraging the company’s accumulated data assets since its founding and IPO.
