Klaviyo Acquires Agency, Founder Torres Returns as CPO
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- Klaviyo has agreed to acquire Agency, a three-year-old AI customer-success startup founded by Elias Torres; financial terms were not disclosed.
- Agency had raised $32 million prior to the deal from Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis since its 2023 founding.
- Torres will join Klaviyo as chief product officer, leading Agency's 25-person team to accelerate the AI agents Composer (marketing campaigns) and Customer Agent (post-sale support like returns and order tracking).
- Bialecki told TechCrunch the combined team aims to bring its agents to Klaviyo's existing 200,000 business customers "and hopefully to millions more over the next couple of years."
- Torres previously co-founded Performable, acquired by HubSpot in 2011, and later served as CTO at Drift through its $1.2 billion sale to Vista Equity in 2021.
- Torres hired Bialecki at Performable in 2010 as one of the startup's first engineers, and Bialecki later invited Torres to angel-invest in Klaviyo's 2015 seed round ahead of its September 2023 IPO at a $9.2 billion valuation.
- Bialecki said Klaviyo's years of customer data give its agents an edge over competitors like Decagon and Sierra in the AI-agent-for-businesses race.
Why it matters: Klaviyo is pairing a public-company war chest and 200,000-customer data trove with the founder-mentor who launched its CEO's career, directly targeting the AI-agent-for-support market against named rivals Decagon and Sierra. Torres's third M&A exit in 15 years underscores how acquihires of AI-agent talent are reshaping the competitive landscape for marketing and customer-experience SaaS.
