Klaviyo, the Boston marketing and customer data company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, said on August 5, 2026 that it had agreed to acquire the team and technology of Agency, a startup that builds AI agents for customer success. Klaviyo did not disclose the price.
Under the agreement Klaviyo takes over Agency's proprietary software and related intellectual property. Elias Torres, Agency's co-founder and chief executive, and other members of the team are expected to join Klaviyo once the deal closes, which the company expects to happen in the third quarter of 2026. TechCrunch reported that Agency had 25 employees.
After closing, Torres becomes Klaviyo's chief product officer. He will run the company's line of agent products, including Composer and Customer Agent, and report to co-founder and co-CEO Andrew Bialecki.
What Agency built
Agency was founded in 2023 and built software agents meant to help companies manage relationships with their existing customers. In Klaviyo's announcement, Torres said the agents were designed to surface what customers need before they ask for it, rather than waiting for a support ticket or a renewal conversation.
Customer success is the function that looks after accounts after a sale, and Agency's agents were built to take on part of that work.
In Klaviyo's announcement, Bialecki said Torres had been at the forefront of AI agents for support and sales for years. Torres said he had always been focused on changing how businesses deal with their customers, and that at Agency the team built agents that bring up what customers need before they ask.
“Elias and I have always believed every customer should be treated like they're the only one.”
Why Klaviyo is buying
Klaviyo has been building agents of its own. Composer is a marketing agent that reviews campaign performance, suggests next steps and builds and adjusts campaigns and automations. Customer Agent is a service that businesses put in front of their own shoppers to answer questions and take actions such as handling returns and order tracking, according to Klaviyo and TechCrunch.
Bialecki told TechCrunch that Klaviyo planned to combine Agency's work with its agent products and offer the result to the roughly 200,000 businesses that use Klaviyo. He described agents as the next major shift in the technology industry. Torres said in the announcement that joining Klaviyo would give him the other half of the picture: a detailed view of consumer behavior from Klaviyo's data.
TechCrunch reported that Klaviyo's share price had fallen along with other software companies, and that Torres and Bialecki argued Klaviyo's years of customer data would give its agents an advantage over AI customer service rivals such as Decagon and Sierra.
The founders and the funding
Torres and Bialecki have worked together before. Torres hired Bialecki as one of the first engineers at Performable, a marketing software startup that HubSpot acquired in 2011. Bialecki left to start Klaviyo, and TechCrunch reported that when Klaviyo raised outside money for the first time in 2015, he invited Torres to invest in the seed round as an angel.
Torres went on to co-found Drift, one of the first companies built around conversational sales and marketing, where he served as chief technology officer for eight years, according to TechCrunch. Drift was later acquired by Vista Equity Partners.
Agency raised $32 million before the sale, TechCrunch reported, from investors including Sequoia, Menlo Ventures and Felicis. The reports did not break the total down by round.
What happens next
Until the deal closes, Agency and Klaviyo remain separate companies. Klaviyo did not say what will happen to Agency's existing product or customers after closing. Its announcement describes the transaction as a purchase of the team, software and intellectual property, with the Agency staff expected to work on Klaviyo's agent products.
Klaviyo went public in September 2023 at a valuation of $9.2 billion, according to TechCrunch.
