Klaviyo Acquires Elias Torres' Agency, Names Him CPO for AI Agents
Klaviyo has acquired Agency, the AI startup founded by Drift co-founder Elias Torres, and appointed Torres as Chief Product Officer to lead its AI agents initiative. The move marks a full-circle moment for Torres, who built his career in the e-commerce and marketing tech ecosystem.
Original sourceKlaviyo has acquired Agency, the AI company founded by serial entrepreneur Elias Torres, best known for co-founding the conversational marketing platform Drift. Torres will join Klaviyo as Chief Product Officer, taking the helm of the company's AI agents strategy — a role that puts him at the center of Klaviyo's push to embed autonomous AI capabilities into its e-commerce marketing platform.
The acquisition is described as a reunion of sorts within the tight-knit Boston-area tech founder community. Torres had built Agency after Drift's acquisition by Salesloft in 2023, positioning it around AI-native customer engagement and automation. Klaviyo, which went public in 2023 and has been deepening its AI feature set, appears to be betting that Torres brings not just the technology but the product vision to accelerate its agent roadmap.
The deal signals a broader trend of established marketing platforms making acquisitions to secure AI talent and product leadership rather than building agent capabilities purely in-house. For Klaviyo, which built its reputation on data-driven email and SMS automation for e-commerce brands, the stakes are clear: AI agents represent the next layer of personalization and autonomous customer interaction, and falling behind would erode its core differentiation against Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Iterable, and a growing field of AI-native competitors.
Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Torres stepping into the CPO role rather than a VP-level position suggests Klaviyo views this as a strategic leadership hire, not merely a product acqui-hire — a bet that his founder instincts and history with conversational AI are exactly what the company needs to ship agents that work at scale.
Panel Takes
The Founder
Business & Market
“The real asset Klaviyo bought here isn't Agency's tech — it's Torres' founder-level conviction on what AI agents should actually do for revenue teams. Making him CPO rather than burying him under a product VP is the tell that this is a leadership acquisition, not a feature acquisition. The question is whether Klaviyo's public-company product org can move fast enough not to neuter exactly what they paid for.”
The Skeptic
Reality Check
“Klaviyo has been shipping 'AI features' for two years and still hasn't produced an agent story that differentiates it from Iterable or Salesforce with a Copilot integration bolted on. Bringing in Torres as CPO is an admission that the internal product org couldn't crack it — which is an honest move, but the clock is ticking. If Klaviyo doesn't ship a working, publicly demonstrable agents product within 12 months, this becomes a very expensive talent retention story with a press release attached.”
The Futurist
Big Picture
“The thesis Klaviyo is betting on: e-commerce brands will stop configuring automation flows and start delegating outcomes to agents that own the full customer lifecycle — triggered messages, timing, channel mix, and offer construction. That bet is plausible but depends on Klaviyo's data moat being deep enough that its agents outperform generic LLM-plus-Shopify-API alternatives by a margin users can actually measure. The second-order effect nobody is talking about: if Klaviyo's agents work, a meaningful layer of email marketing agency work disappears, and the platform becomes the agency.”
The PM
Product Strategy
“The job-to-be-done Klaviyo is hiring Torres to solve is specific: turn Klaviyo from a tool marketers configure into a system that takes a revenue goal and figures out the execution. That's a completely different product than what Klaviyo ships today, and it requires rethinking the entire onboarding and workflow model, not just adding an agent tab. The risk is that this becomes a feature launch rather than a product reinvention — and Torres' actual CPO authority over the core product roadmap will determine which one it is.”