Klaviyo acquires Elias Torres' Agency; founder joins as CPO to lead its AI agents

Klaviyo, the publicly traded e-commerce marketing automation platform, said on August 5 that it has agreed to acquire Agency, an AI-powered customer success startup founded by serial entrepreneur Elias Torres. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. As part of the transaction, Torres will join Klaviyo as chief product officer, leading Agency's roughly 25-person team to accelerate the development and expansion of Klaviyo's AI agents.

Founded in 2023, Agency had raised $32 million from investors including Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis before the acquisition. The deal marks Klaviyo's latest push into AI agents for its merchant base.

Klaviyo's agent lineup centers on two products: Composer, which builds marketing campaigns, and Customer Agent, which handles post-sale support such as returns and order tracking. Torres and his team are expected to fold Agency's product into both lines.

Klaviyo co-founder and CEO Andrew Bialecki told TechCrunch the company plans to combine Agency's product with its own agent offerings and bring them to its roughly 200,000 business customers, with hopes of reaching millions more in the coming years. "It's the next big tech revolution: agents," he said.

The acquisition is something of a homecoming for Torres. In 2010, while co-founding Performable, he hired Bialecki — two years out of Harvard — as one of the startup's first engineers and mentored him on early-stage startup dynamics.

Bialecki went on to co-found Klaviyo, which he initially bootstrapped, and invited Torres to back the company's seed round when it raised its first outside capital in 2015. Klaviyo completed a high-profile IPO in September 2023. Torres, for his part, is a veteran of M&A exits: Performable was acquired by HubSpot in 2011, and he later served as CTO of Drift for eight years until its $1.2 billion sale.

Torres and Bialecki believe Klaviyo's years of merchant customer data give its AI agents an edge over rivals such as Decagon and Sierra. For a SaaS company whose stock has come under pressure, the agent product line is being positioned as a fresh growth story.

The key questions now are how quickly Torres can integrate Agency's customer-success agents into Klaviyo's platform and whether Composer and Customer Agent can expand beyond the existing merchant base. The pace of deployment and monetization will be the real test of this full-circle deal.