Publicly traded e-commerce marketing automation company Klaviyo has agreed to purchase Agency, a three-year-old artificial intelligence customer success startup created by serial entrepreneur Elias Torres, according to an announcement reported by TechCrunch on August 5, 2026. The transaction reunites Torres with Klaviyo co-founder Andrew Bialecki, whom Torres hired and mentored 16 years ago at a different startup. Financial terms weren't revealed, but the deal brings Torres on as Klaviyo's chief product officer along with Agency's 25-person team.
Agency launched in 2023 and secured $32 million from backers including Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis before the acquisition was finalized. Torres and Bialecki first worked together in 2010 at Performable, where Bialecki joined as one of the startup's earliest engineers two years after graduating from Harvard. Bialecki co-founded Klaviyo shortly after leaving Performable, initially funding it himself before raising outside capital in 2015, when he invited Torres to participate as an angel investor in the seed round. Klaviyo completed a high-profile initial public offering in September 2023 at a $9.2 billion valuation. Torres has exited multiple ventures through acquisitions, including Performable's sale to HubSpot in 2011 and Drift's $1.2 billion transaction with Vista Equity in 2021, where he served as chief technology officer for eight years.
"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." Torres will oversee the acceleration of Klaviyo's AI agent offerings, including Composer, which constructs marketing campaigns, and Customer Agent, which manages post-sale support such as returns and order tracking. Bialecki and Torres expressed confidence that Klaviyo's years of accumulated customer data provide its AI agents with an edge over rivals like Decagon and Sierra.
The acquisition reflects a broader push into AI-powered business tools as Klaviyo aims to deliver agents that companies can deploy for their customers. Bialecki characterized the move as reconnecting with Torres for what he views as the next major technology shift after the cloud era, describing agents as "the next Big Tech revolution." Torres recalled that Bialecki "soaked it up in a short amount of time" during their earlier collaboration, absorbing lessons on early-stage startup operations. Despite stock price declines affecting SaaS companies broadly, including Klaviyo, both founders see the platform's extensive data repository as a competitive advantage for training and deploying AI agents at scale. The acquisition positions Klaviyo to expand its AI capabilities across its existing 200,000 business customers while pursuing growth into millions more over the coming years. For Torres, the reunion closes a professional loop that began with him as Bialecki's mentor and now continues with him as Bialecki's chief product officer. Relationships forged during formative startup years can create lasting strategic value, and companies with proprietary data archives may find themselves better positioned than pure-play AI vendors when customer trust and context matter most.