Klaviyo acquires Elias Torres’ Agency in full-circle reunion for tech founders
The serial entrepreneur joins the e-commerce company as CPO to lead its AI agents.
Klaviyo, a publicly-traded e-commerce marketing automation company, has announced the acquisition of Agency, an AI-powered customer success startup founded by serial entrepreneur Elias Torres. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed. Agency, founded in 2023 and having raised $32 million from investors such as Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis, will join Klaviyo under the leadership of Torres, who will become the company's chief product officer.
This acquisition will enable Klaviyo to accelerate the development and expansion of its AI agents, Composer and Customer Agent, which are currently used by 200,000 businesses and have the potential to reach millions more in the coming years. Elias Torres and Andrew Bialecki, Klaviyo's co-founder and CEO, have a long-standing professional relationship.
Torres, who has experience with M&A exits through his co-founding of Performable (acquired by HubSpot in 2011) and Drift (sold to Vista Equity in 2021), previously mentored Bialecki when Bialecki was an engineer at Performable. Klaviyo, which completed its IPO in September 2023 at a valuation of $9.2 billion, believes that the platform's vast customer data gives its AI agents a competitive edge over similar companies.
Bialecki is excited to work with Torres again, as they did during the early days of the cloud era, stating that they are "building the next Big Tech revolution: agents."
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