Klaviyo buys Elias Torres's AI startup Agency, brings him in as CPO

Klaviyo is bringing an old friend back into the fold to spearhead its AI ambitions. The publicly traded marketing automation platform has agreed to acquire Agency, a three-year-old AI-powered customer success startup founded by serial entrepreneur Elias Torres. The deal’s price isn’t being disclosed, but the strategic logic is crystal clear.

For Torres, this is a homecoming. Back in 2010, he hired a young Andrew Bialecki as one of the first engineers at his startup Performable. Bialecki, now Klaviyo’s co-founder and CEO, later asked Torres to be an angel investor in Klaviyo’s seed round in 2015. Now Torres will join the company as its chief product officer, absorbing Agency’s 25-person team. Their mandate: supercharge Klaviyo’s existing AI agents, Composer and Customer Agent, which handle marketing campaign creation and post-sale support like returns and order tracking. “Let’s get the band back together, and let’s go build,” Bialecki told TechCrunch.

Agency had raised $32 million from heavyweight backers including Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis before this exit. The raw technology is clearly valued, but the reunion narrative is the gravitational center here. Bialecki and Torres are betting that the firehose of first-party data from Klaviyo’s 200,000 businesses is a durable moat that competitors like Decagon and Sierra can’t easily replicate. It’s a reasonable thesis: training AI agents on years of actual customer interaction data should, in theory, produce more useful outputs than models relying on generic datasets.

Klaviyo’s stock has been battered along with the rest of the SaaS sector since its splashy $9.2 billion IPO in September 2023. This acquisition signals a shift from pure financial engineering to product-driven conviction. Instead of cutting costs to appease Wall Street, Bialecki is doubling down on a specific technical vision. The risk is execution — integrating a startup’s team and tech while publicly traded is a very different game from doing it in private. If Torres can pull it off a third time, this won’t just be a feel-good story; it will be a template for how legacy SaaS platforms can onboard genuine AI talent without getting disrupted first.

“Elias and I coalesced on the mission of how we provide agents for businesses that they can give to their customers,” Bialecki said, framing the move as the next logical step after the cloud era. The subtext is clear: Klaviyo doesn’t see AI agents as a feature to bolt on, but as the product itself. Whether their shared history translates into a product that millions actually use remains the open, and expensive, question.