Klaviyo Acquires Elias Torres' Agency in a Full-Circle Reunion for Tech Founders

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 terms of the deal were not disclosed. Founded in 2023, Agency had raised $32 million from investors including Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis prior to the acquisition. The acquisition marks a strategic move by Klaviyo to bolster its AI capabilities, a key focus for the company as it looks to expand its platform's functionality into customer service and post-purchase experiences. As part of the deal, Torres will join Klaviyo as chief product officer (CPO), leading Agency's 25-person team to accelerate the development and expansion 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. He is no stranger to M&A exits, having co-founded Performable (acquired by HubSpot in 2011) and later Drift, where he served as CTO for eight years until its $1.2 billion sale to Vista Equity in 2021. Back in 2010 at Performable, Torres hired Bialecki, who had graduated from Harvard two years earlier, as one of that startup's first engineers. Torres mentored Bialecki on early-stage startup dynamics. "He soaked it up in a short amount of time," Torres recalled of their time working together. Bialecki co-founded Klaviyo, which he initially bootstrapped, shortly after leaving Performable. When Klaviyo raised its first outside capital in 2015, Bialecki invited Torres to back the seed round as an angel investor. Klaviyo went on to complete a high-profile IPO in September 2023 at a $9.2 billion valuation. While Klaviyo's stock has taken a hit alongside other SaaS companies, Torres and Bialecki believe the platform's years of customer data give its AI agents an advantage over competitors like Decagon and Sierra. As 2026 unfolds, the race to integrate AI-driven customer experience tools is heating up, and Klaviyo's deep data moat positions it well to differentiate its agents with personalized, context-aware interactions. "Elias and I coalesced on the mission of how we provide agents for businesses that they can give to their customers," Bialecki said, adding that he is excited to work with Torres again as he did at the beginning of the cloud era. "It's the next big tech revolution: agents. Let's get the band back together, and let's go build."

via TechCrunch AI