Klaviyo Closes Acquisition of Agency, Elevates Founder Elias Torres to CPO
Klaviyo just picked up Agency, a three-year-old AI customer success startup founded by serial entrepreneur Elias Torres, for undisclosed terms. The deal lands Torres as chief product officer, where he'll shepherd a 25-person team and push Klaviyo's AI agent products harder than they've gone before.
It's one of those M&A stories that actually makes sense. Torres built Agency to solve a real problem—AI-powered customer success—and Klaviyo needs exactly that capability. The math is straightforward: Klaviyo has 200,000 business customers today. With Agency's technology bolted onto its existing agent products, the goal is to reach "millions more" over the next couple of years, according to Klaviyo co-founder and CEO Andrew Bialecki.
Agency's Quick Rise and Klaviyo's AI Play
Agency was founded in 2023 and had already raised $32 million from a credible stack of investors—Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis, before this acquisition closed. That's not a lot of money for a company that's been around for three years, but it's enough to build something worth acquiring.
Torres wasn't just building a product; he was building the kind of product that fits inside Klaviyo's ecosystem. Agency's AI tools handle customer success in ways that map directly onto Klaviyo's existing platform. That's why the acquisition makes more sense than most acqui-hires these days.
Klaviyo's AI agents already include Composer, which builds marketing campaigns, and Customer Agent, which handles post-sale support like returns and order tracking. Agency's technology slots into that ecosystem. Torres and his team will accelerate development and expansion of both products, according to Klaviyo's announcement.
Torres' Exit Track Record
Torres isn't new to selling companies. He co-founded Performable, which HubSpot acquired in 2011. After that, he served as CTO at Drift for eight years until Vista Equity bought the company for $1.2 billion in 2021. Two major exits. That's a pretty good track record for someone who's been in this game for 15 years or more.
What matters here isn't just that Torres has sold companies before. It's that he's built products that fit into larger platforms, Performable into HubSpot, Drift into Vista's portfolio, and now Agency into Klaviyo. Each time, the product solved a real problem for a bigger company's customers. That's not luck. That's product sense.
The Full-Circle Story
The real story here isn't the money or the product. It's the relationship between Torres and Bialecki. Back in 2010, at Performable, Torres hired Bialecki, one of the startup's very first engineers. Bialecki had graduated from Harvard two years earlier, in 2008. Torres mentored him on early-stage startup dynamics.
"He soaked it up in a short amount of time," Torres recalled.
Bialecki went on to co-found Klaviyo after leaving Performable. He bootstrapped it initially, then raised outside capital in 2015, and invited Torres to back the seed round as an angel investor. That's not just a professional relationship. That's the kind of connection that shapes how these companies operate.
Klaviyo completed its IPO in September 2023 at a $9.2 billion valuation. Stock has taken a hit alongside other SaaS companies, sure, but the fundamentals are there. And now Torres is back, working with Bialecki again, building what they both believe is "the next Big Tech revolution: agents."
Bialecki put it this way: "Let's get the band back together, and let's go build."
Why Klaviyo's Data Matters
There's a competitive angle here that doesn't get enough attention. Klaviyo has years of customer data. Torres and Bialecki believe that gives their AI agents an advantage over competitors like Decagon and Sierra.
It's not just about having more data. It's about having the right data. Klaviyo's customers are e-commerce businesses. They have transaction history, customer interactions, marketing campaigns, and support tickets. That's a rich dataset for training AI agents that actually understand customer behavior.
Competitors like Decagon and Sierra are building AI tools for businesses, but they don't have Klaviyo's depth of customer data. That's a real moat. It's not unbreakable, but it's there.
What This Means for the Market
This acquisition signals something about where AI investment is going. Companies aren't just buying AI startups for their technology. They're buying them for the teams, the product vision, and the strategic fit. Agency's 25-person team isn't just a headcount. It's a group of people who understand customer success in a way that Klaviyo's existing team might not.
The $32 million that Agency raised before this deal isn't a terrible valuation for a three-year-old startup, but the real value is in what Agency built and how it fits into Klaviyo's platform. This isn't a fire sale. It's a strategic acquisition.
Klaviyo's stock has underperformed relative to the broader market, like most SaaS companies. But if Torres and Bialecki can deliver on their promise, bringing Agency's technology to Klaviyo's 200,000 business customers and potentially millions more, this could be one of the smarter bets in the AI acquisition space.
The deal closed in August 2026. Terms remain undisclosed. What's clear is that Klaviyo is betting big on AI agents, and it's putting the right person in charge of making that happen.
