Klaviyo acquires AI customer success startup Agency, naming Elias Torres CPO to lead agents effort
The e-commerce marketing automation platform plans to integrate Agency’s AI tools—Composer and Customer Agent—into its platform and expand them to 200,000 businesses.
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- Klaviyo agreed to acquire AI-powered customer success startup Agency, founded by serial entrepreneur Elias Torres, for an undisclosed sum.
- Torres will join Klaviyo as chief product officer to lead the development and expansion of its AI agents, Composer and Customer Agent.
- Agency had raised $32 million from Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis before the acquisition.
- Klaviyo plans to integrate Agency’s tools into its platform and expand them to 200,000 businesses, with ambitions to reach millions more.
Klaviyo, a publicly traded e-commerce marketing automation platform, announced it has agreed to acquire Agency, an AI-powered customer success startup founded by serial entrepreneur Elias Torres. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Agency, which was founded in 2023, had raised $32 million from investors including Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis prior to the acquisition.
As part of the agreement, Torres will join Klaviyo as chief product officer, where he will lead the 25-person team from Agency to accelerate the development and expansion of Klaviyo’s AI agents. These include Composer, which builds marketing campaigns, and Customer Agent, which handles post-sale support tasks such as returns and order tracking.
Klaviyo co-founder and CEO Andrew Bialecki stated that the company aims to combine Agency’s product with its existing agent offerings and bring them to Klaviyo’s customer base of 200,000 businesses, with plans to expand to millions more over the next few years.
Torres brings prior M&A experience, having co-founded Performable (acquired by HubSpot in 2011) and later serving as CTO of Drift until its $1.2 billion sale to Vista Equity in 2021. Notably, Torres and Bialecki have a long-standing professional relationship; Torres hired Bialecki as an early engineer at Performable in 2010, and Bialecki later invited Torres to invest in Klaviyo’s 2015 seed round.
Bialecki emphasized the shared mission to provide businesses with customer-facing agents, framing the collaboration as a return to their early days in the cloud era and positioning it as part of what they describe as the "next Big Tech revolution: agents."