Klaviyo has agreed to acquire Agency, a three-year-old AI startup founded by Elias Torres. The deal value was not disclosed.
Agency joins Klaviyo
Agency was established in 2023 and secured $32 million from Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis before the purchase. Torres will move to Klaviyo as chief product officer. He will lead the 25-person team to expand the company’s AI agents, specifically Composer for marketing campaigns and Customer Agent for support tasks such as returns and order tracking.
Klaviyo’s next step
Andrew Bialecki, Klaviyo co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that the acquisition allows the company to combine Agency’s work with its existing agent products. The goal is to serve 200,000 businesses immediately, with plans to reach millions more over the next few years.
Full circle for Torres
This move completes a career loop for Torres. He previously co-founded Performable, which HubSpot acquired in 2011. He later served as CTO at Drift until the company sold for $1.2 billion to Vista Equity in 2021.
Old connections
At Performable in 2010, Torres hired Bialecki as one of the first engineers. Bialecki had graduated from Harvard two years prior. Torres mentored him on early-stage startup dynamics. Bialecki absorbed the experience quickly, according to Torres.
Bialecki left Performable to bootstrap Klaviyo. When the company raised its first outside capital in 2015, Bialecki invited Torres to back the seed round as an angel investor. Klaviyo completed an IPO in September 2023 with a valuation of $9.2 billion.
Competitive edge
Klaviyo stock has fallen alongside other SaaS companies. Torres and Bialecki argue that years of customer data give their AI agents an advantage over rivals like Decagon and Sierra.
Building again
Bialecki stated that he and Torres agreed on the mission of providing agents for businesses to give to their customers. He expressed excitement to work with Torres again as he did at the start of the cloud era. He described agents as the next big tech revolution and called for the team to rebuild and build.
What it means
Torres brings a team focused on specific AI agents to a platform with deep data. This combination aims to speed up the rollout of automated support and marketing tools for a large number of businesses.
