Klaviyo, a publicly traded e-commerce marketing automation platform, 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. As part of the deal, Torres will join Klaviyo as chief product officer, 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. Source: techcrunch
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. Source: techcrunch
Klaviyo co-founder and CEO Andrew Bialecki said, “Elias and the team built a great product with Agency. 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.” 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. Source: techcrunch
