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

There's a certain poetry to this deal that's easy to miss if you skim the press release. Klaviyo, the e-commerce marketing platform that went public in 2023 at a $9.2 billion valuation, has acquired Agency, a three-year-old AI customer success startup, and brought founder Elias Torres on board as chief product officer. Terms weren't disclosed, but Agency had raised $32 million from Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis before the sale.

The real story is the relationship. Back in 2010, Torres hired Andrew Bialecki, then two years out of Harvard, as one of the first engineers at his startup Performable. Torres mentored him through the chaos of early-stage building. Bialecki left to bootstrap Klaviyo, and when it finally raised outside money in 2015, he brought Torres back in as an angel investor. Now, fifteen years after that first hire, Torres will report into the guy he once trained.

Torres isn't new to exits. Performable sold to HubSpot in 2011, and he spent eight years as CTO at Drift before Vista Equity bought it for $1.2 billion in 2021. Agency, launched in 2023, was his bet on AI-driven customer success — and Klaviyo wants to fold its 25-person team directly into two existing AI products: Composer, which builds marketing campaigns, and Customer Agent, which handles returns and order tracking after a sale.

Bialecki's pitch is that Klaviyo's advantage isn't the AI itself but the mountain of customer data it's been sitting on for years, something he thinks gives it an edge over rivals like Decagon and Sierra. That's a reasonable argument, though Klaviyo's stock has slid along with the rest of the SaaS sector, so the pressure to prove it fast is real. Bialecki is framing agentic AI as the next platform shift, on par with the cloud-computing wave he and Torres rode together the first time. Whether that turns out true or not, reuniting with the person who once showed you how to build a company is a pretty good hedge against betting wrong alone.