Klaviyo acquires Elias Torres’ Agency in full-circle reunion for tech founders

Klaviyo has acquired Agency, the company founded by serial entrepreneur Elias Torres, in a deal that also brings Torres into Klaviyo as chief product officer. The move is framed as a full-circle reunion among tech founders and centers on putting Torres in charge of Klaviyo’s AI agents work. TechCrunch reported the transaction and the leadership change together, tying the acquisition directly to product ownership rather than treating it as a pure talent hire.

On the product side, the acquisition folds Agency into Klaviyo and assigns Torres the CPO mandate to lead AI agents. That structure matters: the buyer is not only buying a company, it is installing the founder as the executive owner of a specific product surface. For an e-commerce company, agent work typically sits at the intersection of automation, customer interaction, and operational tooling, so the CPO role is the control point for how those systems are prioritized, shipped, and integrated across the existing product line.

For engineers and builders, this is a signal about where product authority is moving. AI agent features are no longer a side experiment when a serial founder is hired as CPO to own them and the company is acquired to support that push. Teams shipping marketing, commerce, or customer-facing automation should expect agent capabilities to compete for roadmap space against classic feature work, with clearer executive sponsorship and less room to treat agents as optional demos.

The competitive context is the race among commerce and marketing platforms to productize agents instead of only shipping copilots or one-off automations. Acquiring an agency-built company and elevating its founder to CPO is a way to buy both capability and leadership credibility in one move. Rivals that rely only on internal incubation will face a contrast: Klaviyo is pairing M&A with top-level product ownership rather than parking AI agents under a secondary org chart.

What to watch next is how Agency’s people and product assets show up under Torres’s CPO scope, and which AI agent workflows Klaviyo elevates first. Builders should track whether agent features become core product surfaces with clear ownership and shipping cadence, or stay as loosely integrated experiments after the reunion press cycle fades.