Klaviyo acquires Elias Torres' AI startup Agency

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. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Founded in 2023, Agency had raised $32 million from investors including Sequoia, Menlo Ventures and Felicis before the acquisition.

As part of the deal, Torres will join Klaviyo as chief product officer, leading Agency’s 25-person team to accelerate development of Klaviyo’s AI agents: Composer, which builds marketing campaigns, and Customer Agent, which handles post-sale support like returns and order tracking. “Elias and the team built a great product with Agency,” Klaviyo co-founder and CEO Andrew Bialecki told TechCrunch. “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, joining Klaviyo brings his career full circle. Back in 2010, he hired Bialecki as one of the first engineers at his startup Performable, mentoring him on early-stage dynamics; Performable was acquired by HubSpot in 2011. Bialecki went on to co-found Klaviyo, which he initially bootstrapped, and when the company raised its first outside capital in 2015, he invited Torres to back the seed round as an angel investor. Klaviyo later completed a high-profile IPO in September 2023 at a $9.2 billion valuation. Torres, meanwhile, went on to serve as CTO of Drift for eight years until its $1.2 billion sale to Vista Equity in 2021, before founding Agency.

Klaviyo’s stock has taken a hit alongside other SaaS companies, but Torres and Bialecki believe the platform’s years of customer data give its AI agents an advantage over competitors like Decagon and Sierra. Both have described the acquisition as a return to the partnership that shaped Klaviyo’s early years, betting that combining Agency’s product with Klaviyo’s own agent line will help the company compete as AI agents become a new front in enterprise software.

Why it matters

The deal shows an established SaaS incumbent buying its way into the AI-agent race with a founder it already trusts, rather than building that capability from scratch or competing purely on new entrants’ terms.