Klaviyo buys Elias Torres agency in full-circle move for tech founders

Klaviyo, a publicly traded e-commerce marketing automation platform, has agreed to acquire Agency, a three-year-old AI-driven customer success startup founded by serial entrepreneur Elias Torres. Specific financial terms of the transaction remain undisclosed.
Established in 2023, Agency secured $32 million in funding from prominent investors such as Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis before the acquisition.
Under the agreement, Torres (pictured left) will join Klaviyo as chief product officer (CPO). He will lead Agency’s 25-person team to accelerate the development and expansion of Klaviyo’s AI agents: Composer, which automates marketing campaign creation, and Customer Agent, which manages post-sale support tasks like returns and order tracking.
“Elias and his team built an exceptional product with Agency,” Klaviyo co-founder and CEO Andrew Bialecki (pictured right) told TechCrunch. “We plan to integrate this with our existing agent products and bring them to 200,000 businesses—and potentially millions more in the coming years.”
For Torres, joining Klaviyo marks a full-circle moment in his career. He has extensive experience with M&A exits, having co-founded Performable (acquired by HubSpot in 2011) and later serving as CTO at Drift for eight years until its $1.2 billion sale to Vista Equity in 2021.
In 2010, while at Performable, Torres hired Bialecki, a recent Harvard graduate, as one of the startup’s first engineers. Torres mentored Bialecki on early-stage startup dynamics, recalling that “he absorbed the lessons quickly.”
Bialecki co-founded Klaviyo, initially bootstrapping the venture, shortly after leaving Performable. When Klaviyo raised its first external funding in 2015, Bialecki invited Torres to participate as an angel investor in the seed round.
Klaviyo subsequently completed a high-profile IPO in September 2023, valuing the company at $9.2 billion.
Although Klaviyo’s stock has declined alongside other SaaS companies, Torres and Bialecki believe the platform’s extensive customer data provides its AI agents with a competitive edge over rivals like Decagon and Sierra.
“Elias and I aligned on the mission to provide businesses with agents they can offer to their customers,” Bialecki said, expressing excitement about collaborating with Torres again, reminiscent of the early cloud computing era. “This is the next major tech revolution: agents. Let’s reunite and build.”
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Klaviyo, a publicly traded e-commerce marketing automation platform, has agreed to acquire Agency, a three-year-old AI-driven customer success startup founded by serial entrepreneur Elias Torres. Specific financial terms of the transaction remain undisclosed.
Established in 2023, Agency secured $32 million in funding from prominent investors such as Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis before the acquisition.
Under the agreement, Torres (pictured left) will join Klaviyo as chief product officer (CPO). He will lead Agency’s 25-person team to accelerate the development and expansion of Klaviyo’s AI agents: Composer, which automates marketing campaign creation, and Customer Agent, which manages post-sale support tasks like returns and order tracking.
“Elias and his team built an exceptional product with Agency,” Klaviyo co-founder and CEO Andrew Bialecki (pictured right) told TechCrunch. “We plan to integrate this with our existing agent products and bring them to 200,000 businesses—and potentially millions more in the coming years.”
For Torres, joining Klaviyo marks a full-circle moment in his career. He has extensive experience with M&A exits, having co-founded Performable (acquired by HubSpot in 2011) and later serving as CTO at Drift for eight years until its $1.2 billion sale to Vista Equity in 2021.
In 2010, while at Performable, Torres hired Bialecki, a recent Harvard graduate, as one of the startup’s first engineers. Torres mentored Bialecki on early-stage startup dynamics, recalling that “he absorbed the lessons quickly.”
Bialecki co-founded Klaviyo, initially bootstrapping the venture, shortly after leaving Performable. When Klaviyo raised its first external funding in 2015, Bialecki invited Torres to participate as an angel investor in the seed round.
Klaviyo subsequently completed a high-profile IPO in September 2023, valuing the company at $9.2 billion.
Although Klaviyo’s stock has declined alongside other SaaS companies, Torres and Bialecki believe the platform’s extensive customer data provides its AI agents with a competitive edge over rivals like Decagon and Sierra.
“Elias and I aligned on the mission to provide businesses with agents they can offer to their customers,” Bialecki said, expressing excitement about collaborating with Torres again, reminiscent of the early cloud computing era. “This is the next major tech revolution: agents. Let’s reunite and build.”
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