Klaviyo acquires Agency's AI technology and names Elias Torres product chief

Why it matters

Klaviyo is pairing Agency's agent technology with its consumer data and distribution, while putting a repeat founder in charge of the products carrying its AI strategy.

Klaviyo agreed on August 5th to acquire Agency's team, software and intellectual property, bringing founder Elias Torres (@eliast) into the public software company as chief product officer.

Torres will lead Klaviyo's agent products, including Composer and Customer Agent, and report to co-founder and co-CEO Andrew Bialecki (@abialecki). Klaviyo expects the transaction to close during the third quarter of 2026, after which Torres and other Agency employees are expected to join.

The deal reunites two Boston software builders whose working relationship predates Klaviyo. Torres hired Bialecki as an early engineer at Performable, the marketing software business that HubSpot acquired in 2011. Bialecki later co-founded Klaviyo, while Torres co-founded Drift with David Cancel and built the conversational sales software business through its 2021 sale to Vista Equity Partners.

Torres returned to the startup market with Agency, an AI system designed to handle work traditionally assigned to customer success managers. The product analyzed information from email, CRM records, calls and chats to prepare meetings, manage follow-ups, support onboarding and identify customer risks or opportunities.

The idea emerged while Torres was advising OpenAI on enterprise deployments in early 2023, including work involving the NBA and Live Nation, he told TechCrunch. Agency publicly launched in October 2024 with a $12 million seed round led by Sequoia Capital and HubSpot Ventures.

Agency subsequently raised a $20 million Series A led by Menlo Ventures in November 2025, with Sequoia, Felicis Ventures, Snowflake Ventures and Databricks Ventures participating. The round accompanied the public launch of Kai, which Torres described as an autonomous AI co-worker that could monitor and act across a customer's full account base. Those two rounds gave Agency $32 million in announced financing before the Klaviyo transaction.

Klaviyo is buying an operator as well as an agent stack

Klaviyo framed the agreement around acquiring Agency's employees and proprietary technology. That structure gives Klaviyo a founder-led product group with experience building customer-facing automation while folding Agency's work into a much larger data and distribution base.

Torres has argued that AI software should execute customer work instead of leaving users to interpret another dashboard. He has also promoted an operating model built around small teams, saying Agency was designed to pursue substantial revenue without scaling headcount at the rate associated with conventional software businesses.

Klaviyo offers the setting to test that thesis across consumer marketing and service. Composer reviews account data and campaign performance, identifies potential growth opportunities, and prepares audiences, copy and campaigns for a user's approval. Customer Agent interacts directly with shoppers, answering questions and taking actions using information held in Klaviyo's CRM.

The distinction matters because Agency was built primarily around B2B customer success teams, whose work centers on managing a defined portfolio of corporate accounts. Klaviyo is applying related agent technology to consumer businesses handling far larger volumes of purchases, messages and service interactions.

Klaviyo says its infrastructure contains more than nine billion consumer profiles and ingests and indexes more than 250 trillion data points each quarter. Klaviyo also says more than 205,000 paying customers use its platform. Those figures are company-reported, but they explain the logic Torres gave for selling: Agency contributed software for proactively managing customer relationships, while Klaviyo supplied the behavioral data and installed base needed to deploy it at greater scale.

"At Agency, we built agents that proactively surface what customers need before they ask," Torres said in Klaviyo's announcement. He described Klaviyo's consumer data as the missing piece needed to expand that work.

The reporting line completes an unusual reversal. Torres once hired Bialecki as an engineer. After the acquisition closes, Torres will report to him while directing the AI products at the center of Klaviyo's attempt to expand from marketing automation into an autonomous CRM.