Klaviyo acquires AI startup Agency and hires founder Elias Torres

In short: Klaviyo said it will acquire the AI startup Agency, and Agency founder Elias Torres will join Klaviyo as chief product officer.

What happened

Klaviyo, a public company that sells marketing tools for online businesses, has agreed to buy Agency, a three-year-old startup that builds AI tools for customer support teams. The companies did not share the price.

Agency was founded in 2023 and raised $32 million from investors including Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis before the acquisition.

As part of the deal, Torres will lead Agency’s 25-person team inside Klaviyo. He will oversee work on Klaviyo’s “AI agents,” which are software helpers that can take actions for a business, a bit like a staff member following a checklist. Klaviyo’s current agents include Composer, which helps build marketing campaigns, and Customer Agent, which can handle after-purchase tasks like returns and order tracking.

Klaviyo CEO Andrew Bialecki told TechCrunch the goal is to combine Agency’s product with Klaviyo’s existing tools and bring them to Klaviyo’s roughly 200,000 business customers.

Torres and Bialecki also have a long history. Torres previously co-founded Performable, which HubSpot acquired in 2011, and Drift, which was sold to Vista Equity in 2021. Torres hired Bialecki as an early engineer at Performable, and later invested in Klaviyo’s early funding.

Why it matters

Many online stores are trying to answer customer questions faster without hiring large support teams. If Klaviyo’s AI helpers work well, more small and mid-sized businesses could use them for common tasks like tracking orders, handling returns, and setting up marketing messages.

Source: TechCrunch AI