Klaviyo, the publicly traded e-commerce marketing automation platform, has agreed to acquire Agency, a three-year-old AI-powered customer success startup. The deal, announced in August 2026, brings Agency founder Elias Torres into Klaviyo as chief product officer. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Founded in 2023, Agency had raised $32 million from investors including Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis before the acquisition. Torres will lead Agency’s 25-person team at Klaviyo, with a focus on expanding the company’s AI agent products: Composer, which builds marketing campaigns, and Customer Agent, which handles post-sale support such as returns and order tracking.
“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,” Klaviyo co-founder and CEO Andrew Bialecki said.
The acquisition carries a personal dimension for both executives. In 2010, Torres hired Bialecki as one of the first engineers at his startup Performable, which was later acquired by HubSpot in 2011. After leaving Performable, Bialecki co-founded Klaviyo, and when the company raised its first outside capital in 2015, he invited Torres to participate as an angel investor. Klaviyo went on to complete an IPO in September 2023 at a $9.2 billion valuation.
Torres is no stranger to large exits. He co-founded Drift, where he served as CTO for eight years until its $1.2 billion sale to Vista Equity in 2021.
Bialecki and Torres said they believe Klaviyo’s accumulated customer data gives its AI agents a competitive edge. “It’s the next Big Tech revolution: agents. Let’s get the band back together, and let’s go build,” Bialecki said. The deal may position Klaviyo to compete more directly with AI customer service platforms such as Decagon and Sierra.
Source: TechCrunch