A Homecoming Decades in the Making
Elias Torres is going back to where it all started. Sort of.
Klaviyo, the publicly traded e-commerce marketing platform, has agreed to buy Agency — a three-year-old AI customer success startup Torres founded — and bring him aboard as chief product officer. Financial terms weren’t disclosed, but the move is a reunion 15 years in the making.
The purchase is more than a talent grab. It’s a full-circle moment for Torres and Klaviyo CEO Andrew Bialecki, whose professional relationship dates back to 2010, when Torres hired a young Harvard grad named Bialecki as one of the first engineers at his startup Performable.
Now they’re reuniting to build AI agents for Klaviyo’s 200,000-plus business customers.
What Agency Brings to Klaviyo
Agency, which raised $32 million from Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis, has spent the last three years building AI tools for customer success. Its team of 25 will fold into Klaviyo, where they’ll accelerate two flagship agent products:
- Composer — an AI agent that builds marketing campaigns
- Customer Agent — an AI that handles post-sale support like returns and order tracking
Bialecki told TechCrunch the plan is to combine Agency’s tech with Klaviyo’s existing agent products and scale it across the platform’s vast customer base. “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,” he said.
From Performable to Drift to Klaviyo: Torres’ Journey
Torres has been here before. He co-founded Performable, which HubSpot acquired in 2011. Then came Drift, where he served as CTO for eight years before the company sold to Vista Equity for $1.2 billion in 2021.
But the Klaviyo connection runs deeper than a typical M&A exit. When Klaviyo raised its first outside capital in 2015, Bialecki invited Torres to participate in the seed round as an angel investor. Torres backed the company that would go public in September 2023 at a $9.2 billion valuation.
“He soaked it up in a short amount of time,” Torres recalled of mentoring Bialecki back in the Performable days. That mentorship clearly stuck.
Why Klaviyo Thinks Its AI Agents Have an Edge
Klaviyo’s stock has taken a hit alongside the broader SaaS market, and its AI ambitions face stiff competition from startups like Decagon and Sierra. But Bialecki and Torres believe Klaviyo holds a key advantage: years of accumulated customer data.
“Elias and I coalesced on the mission of how we provide agents for businesses that they can give to their customers,” Bialecki said. He framed the acquisition as a chance to reunite the original team at the start of what he calls “the next big tech revolution: agents.”
“Let’s get the band back together, and let’s go build,” he added.
What This Means for Klaviyo’s Future
This acquisition signals Klaviyo is doubling down on AI agents as a core part of its platform — not just as a marketing add-on but as a customer experience layer. By bringing in Torres, who has a track record of building and selling successful startups, Klaviyo gets both a seasoned product leader and the technology to back it up.
For Torres, it’s a return to familiar territory — working with the engineer he once mentored, now at a company with a market cap in the billions. The band is back together, and the stakes are higher than ever.
