Klaviyo (NYSE: KVYO), a publicly traded marketing software company, has agreed to acquire Agency, a three-year-old startup that makes AI tools for customer service teams. The deal brings Agency's founder, Elias Torres, to Klaviyo as chief product officer, along with his 25-person team. The purchase price was not disclosed. The team will help build Klaviyo's AI agents, called Composer and Customer Agent (TechCrunch).

The acquisition reunites Torres with Klaviyo's co-founder and CEO, Andrew Bialecki. The two have known each other professionally since 2010, when Torres hired Bialecki — then a recent Harvard graduate — as an engineer at a startup called Performable. HubSpot bought Performable in 2011. Torres went on to co-found Drift, another tech company, and served as its chief technology officer for eight years until it was sold for $1.2 billion in 2021. When Bialecki started Klaviyo and raised his first outside funding in 2015, he invited Torres to invest early as an angel investor (TechCrunch).

Agency, founded in 2023, built software that uses AI to handle tasks normally done by customer success managers — people whose job is to keep clients happy and help them get the most out of a product (TechCrunch). The startup raised $32 million from well-known investors including Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis before being acquired. That total includes a $20 million funding round announced in November 2025 (Yahoo Finance).

Klaviyo went public in September 2023 with a valuation of $9.2 billion. The company believes its years of stored customer data will give its AI agents an advantage over rivals like Decagon and Sierra. Bialecki said Klaviyo plans to combine Agency's product with its existing tools and bring them to 200,000 businesses, with the goal of reaching millions more in the next couple of years (TechCrunch).

Klaviyo has also announced a partnership with Google to build what it calls autonomous customer experiences, according to the company's newsroom (Klaviyo Newsroom).

The thinking behind the deal is fairly simple. Klaviyo's strength has always been the customer data it collects — what people buy, what they browse, which emails they open, and patterns that predict future behavior. If an AI agent for customer service is only as good as the information it can draw on, then a company with years of stored shopping data has a real head start over a new startup building connections from scratch. Torres and Bialecki are making that argument directly, and it carries weight in a market where competitors like Decagon and Sierra are building AI agents without owning their own customer data.

Torres's history is relevant here. He has now built and sold two companies in the marketing technology space, and both were absorbed into larger platforms rather than continuing on their own. Performable's tools were folded into HubSpot. Drift's technology was absorbed into the portfolio of its buyer, Vista Equity Partners. Agency following the same path into Klaviyo suggests Torres is choosing reach and data access over building independently, which makes sense for a young AI company in a market where larger platforms with existing customers are pulling ahead.

The 25-person Agency team is small compared to the ambition Bialecki described. Expanding these AI tools to serve 200,000 businesses, and eventually millions, will require technical integration, adapting the AI for different types of online stores, and a level of reliability that customer service demands. An AI agent that makes a wrong product recommendation is one thing; an agent that mishandles a customer relationship carries a higher cost. The Google partnership also suggests Klaviyo will rely on outside help for some of the AI infrastructure rather than building everything in-house.

Torres is Nicaraguan-born and previously built teams at Drift and HubSpot before starting Agency (Agency Press). Taking the chief product officer role at a public company, rather than staying in an entrepreneurial capacity, gives him control over the product direction for all of Klaviyo, not just the Agency technology.

For Klaviyo, the acquisition is a bet that the future of marketing and customer support software will be won by companies that own the data, have the customer base, and can deploy AI agents that work across both. The deal adds a small team but a strategic position, and it puts an experienced builder in the product role at a time when AI agents are becoming a central part of business software.