Klaviyo acquired Elias Torres' Agency and made him CPO of its AI-agent push

E-commerce marketing automation platform, public since a 2023 IPO at a $9.2 billion valuation, serving 200,000 businesses.

That Klaviyo's years of customer data make its AI agents — campaign-building Composer, support-handling Customer Agent — better than startups' generic ones.

Agency raised $32 million from investors including Sequoia, Menlo Ventures and Felicis before the acquisition; terms of the deal were not disclosed.

In 2010, Elias Torres hired a Harvard graduate named Andrew Bialecki as one of Performable's first engineers, and mentored him on early-stage startup dynamics. Bialecki left to co-found Klaviyo, bootstrapping it at first; when Klaviyo raised its first outside capital in 2015, he invited Torres to back the seed round as an angel investor.

Torres is a serial M&A seller: he co-founded Performable, acquired by HubSpot in 2011, and Drift, where he served as CTO for eight years until its $1.2 billion sale to Vista Equity in 2021. In 2023 he founded Agency, raising $32 million from Sequoia, Menlo Ventures and Felicis. In August 2026, publicly traded Klaviyo agreed to acquire Agency; Torres joined as chief product officer, leading Agency's 25-person team to accelerate Klaviyo's AI agents — Composer, which builds marketing campaigns, and Customer Agent, which handles post-sale support.

The deal is an acqui-reunion: the founder being acquired once hired and mentored the acquiring CEO, then angel-invested in his company.

Klaviyo is buying a data-moat argument — years of e-commerce customer data as the edge for AI agents against venture-backed rivals Decagon and Sierra.

Torres has been on the selling side twice before (HubSpot, Vista Equity), so Klaviyo acquires both his product and his AI-agent playbook.

The CPO title signals intent: Agency's team is not a tuck-in but the engine of Klaviyo's agent roadmap.

When SaaS multiples sag, the moat you advertise is your data — and the fastest way to prove it is hiring the person building agents against you.

As of 2026-08-05 the acquisition had been agreed with Torres joining as chief product officer; the combined team aimed to bring AI agents to Klaviyo's 200,000 businesses and, in Bialecki's words, to millions more over the next couple of years.