Klaviyo acquires Elias Torres' Agency, uniting former mentor and protégé
What's the deal? Klaviyo, the publicly traded e-commerce marketing automation platform, has agreed to acquire AgencyDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a three-year-old AI-powered customer success startup founded by serial entrepreneur Elias Torres. Terms were not disclosed. Agency, founded in 2023, had raised $32 million from investors including Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and FelicisDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →.
What's the endgame? Torres will join Klaviyo as chief product officer, leading Agency's 25-person team to accelerate Klaviyo's AI agents: Composer, which builds marketing campaigns, and Customer Agent, which handles post-sale support like returns and order tracking.
Why it matters: The deal reunites former mentor and protégé. In 2010 at PerformableDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Torres hired Klaviyo co-founder and CEO Andrew Bialecki as one of that startup's first engineers. Torres later backed Klaviyo's 2015 seed round as an angel investor.
"Elias and the team built a great product with Agency," Bialecki told TechCrunch. "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."
The backstory: Torres is no stranger to exits, having co-founded Performable (acquired by HubSpot in 2011) and Drift, where he was chief technology officer for eight years until its $1.2 billion sale to Vista EquityDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → in 2021. Bialecki bootstrapped Klaviyo before taking it public in September 2023 at a $9.2 billion valuation.
What could go wrong? Klaviyo's stock has fallen alongside other SaaS companies. Its AI agents also face rivals such as Decagon and Sierra, though Torres and Bialecki argue that years of customer data give Klaviyo an edge.
The signal: The acquisition is a bet that established platforms with deep data can win the agent race over pure-play startups. "It's the next big tech revolution: agents," Bialecki said. "Let's get the band back together, and let's go build."
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Read more: TechCrunch
