Klaviyo just bought a 25-person startup to speed up the software that answers “where’s my order?” so a human doesn’t have to. On 5 August, the e-commerce marketing firm Klaviyo (NYSE: KVYO) agreed to acquire the team and technology of Agency, an AI customer-success outfit founded in 2023 by Elias Torres. Terms were not disclosed. Torres joins as chief product officer once the deal closes, expected in the third quarter, reporting to co-CEO Andrew Bialecki.
If the name Torres rings a bell, that is the point. He co-founded Drift, the “conversational marketing” firm sold to Vista Equity Partners in 2021 in a deal valued north of a billion dollars. Agency, his follow-up, raised roughly $32 million from Sequoia, Menlo Ventures and Felicis to build agentic AI (software that does not just answer questions but takes actions on your behalf) aimed at customer-success teams, the people who onboard and keep paying customers.
This is an acqui-hire, industry slang for buying a company mainly to land its staff and know-how rather than its revenue. Klaviyo is not paying for Agency’s customer list. It is paying for a proven founder and a small team who have already built the thing Klaviyo wants to sell.
The bit worth watching: Torres will run Klaviyo’s agent line, Composer and Customer Agent. Composer builds and tweaks marketing campaigns on its own. Customer Agent is the one to clock, an always-on bot that talks directly to your shoppers and acts in the moment, handling returns, order tracking and the post-purchase back-and-forth that used to keep a support desk busy. Klaviyo’s pitch to small merchants is that they get an enterprise-grade support team without hiring one.
Read that plainly. The value on offer is labour you no longer pay for. For a shop owner drowning in DMs, that is a genuine relief. For the call-centre and support workers whose whole job is answering those DMs, it is the quiet part said out loud. The founder gets a C-suite chair and a full-circle press cycle. The support staff get an “always-on agent.”
What it means if you already use Klaviyo: nothing changes today. The deal has not closed, and the agent features are still maturing. Torres himself has argued in public that businesses keep rejecting the very automation they ask for, because it over-promises. So the honest advice is to trial Customer Agent on low-stakes queries first (order status, returns policy) before you let it near anything involving refunds or a furious customer. Keep a human on the money.
The strategic logic is clear enough. Klaviyo reported quarterly revenue up 26% to around $370 million and is betting its next leg of growth on agents, not email blasts. Buying a team that has done this before is faster than building one from scratch. Whether merchants actually want a bot negotiating their returns is the question the next few quarters will answer.
Did you know: Torres’s first product at Agency was named Kai, after his real-life executive assistant, whose knack for predicting what he needed became the template for the software.
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