Klaviyo acquires Elias Torres’ Agency in full-circle reunion for tech founders

Publicly traded e-commerce selling automation level Klaviyo has agreed to get Agency, a three-year-old AI-powered lawsuit occurrence startup founded by serial entrepreneur Elias Torres. The presumption of the woody were not disclosed.

Founded successful 2023, Agency had raised $32 cardinal from investors including Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis anterior to the acquisition.

As portion of the deal, Torres (pictured left) volition articulation Klaviyo arsenic main merchandise serviceman (CPO), starring Agency’s 25-person squad to accelerate the improvement and enlargement of Klaviyo’s AI agents: Composer, which builds selling campaigns, and Customer Agent, which handles post-sale enactment similar returns and bid tracking

“Elias and the squad built a large merchandise with Agency,” Klaviyo co-founder and CEO Andrew Bialecki (pictured right) told TechCrunch. “We’re going to instrumentality that and harvester it with our cause products and effort to bring that to 200,000 businesses—and hopefully to millions much implicit the adjacent mates of years.”

For Torres, joining Klaviyo brings his vocation afloat circle. He is nary alien to M&A exits, having co-founded Performable (acquired by HubSpot successful 2011) and aboriginal Drift, wherever helium served arsenic CTO for 8 years until its $1.2 cardinal sale to Vista Equity successful 2021.

Back successful 2010 astatine Performable, Torres hired Bialecki, who had graduated from Harvard 2 years earlier, arsenic 1 of that startup’s archetypal engineers. Torres mentored Bialecki connected early-stage startup dynamics. “He soaked it up successful a abbreviated magnitude of time,” Torres recalled of their clip moving together.

Bialecki co-founded Klaviyo, which helium initially bootstrapped, soon aft leaving Performable. When Klaviyo raised its archetypal extracurricular superior successful 2015, Bialecki invited Torres to backmost the effect circular arsenic an angel investor.
Klaviyo went connected to implicit a high-profile IPO successful September 2023 astatine a $9.2 cardinal valuation.

While Klaviyo’s banal has taken a deed alongside different SaaS companies, Torres and Bialecki judge the platform’s years of lawsuit information springiness its AI agents an vantage implicit competitors similar Decagon and Sierra.

“Elias and I coalesced connected the ngo of however we supply agents for businesses that they tin springiness to their customers,” Bialecki said, adding that helium is excited to enactment with Torres again arsenic helium did astatine the opening of the unreality era. “It’s the adjacent large tech revolution: agents. Let’s get the set backmost together, and let’s spell build.”