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.<\/p>\n
Founded in 2023, Agency<\/a> had raised $32 million from investors, including Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis prior to the acquisition.<\/p>\n As part of the deal, Torres (pictured left) will join Klaviyo as chief product officer, leading Agency\u2019s 25-person team to accelerate the development and expansion of Klaviyo\u2019s AI agents: Composer, which builds marketing campaigns, and Customer Agent, which handles post-sale support like returns and order tracking.<\/p>\n \u201cElias and the team built a great product with Agency,\u201d Klaviyo co-founder and CEO Andrew Bialecki (pictured right) told TechCrunch. \u201cWe\u2019re going to take that and combine it with our agent products and try to bring that to 200,000 businesses \u2014 and hopefully to millions more over the next couple of years.\u201d<\/p>\n 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<\/a> in 2021.<\/p>\n Back in 2010 at Performable, Torres hired Bialecki, who had graduated from Harvard two years earlier, as one of that startup\u2019s first engineers. Torres mentored Bialecki on early-stage startup dynamics. \u201cHe soaked it up in a short amount of time,\u201d Torres recalled of their time working together.<\/p>\n 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. While Klaviyo\u2019s stock has taken a hit alongside other SaaS companies, Torres and Bialecki believe the platform\u2019s years of customer data give its AI agents an advantage over competitors like Decagon and Sierra.<\/p>\n \u201cElias and I coalesced on the mission of how we provide agents for businesses that they can give to their customers,\u201d Bialecki said, adding that he is excited to work with Torres again, as he did at the beginning of the cloud era. \u201cIt\u2019s the next Big Tech revolution: agents. Let\u2019s get the band back together, and let\u2019s go build.\u201d<\/p>\n
Klaviyo went on to complete a high-profile IPO in September 2023 at a $9.2 billion<\/a> valuation.<\/p>\n