Elias Torres has accomplished a lot for someone who immigrated to the United States from Nicaragua at the age of 17 with no command of English. He served as VP of Engineering at HubSpot before co-founding Drift, which he sold to Vista Equity in 2021 for approximately $1.2 billion.
“It's very rare to get to this point, but we're not done yet,” Torres told TechCrunch.
About a year ago, Torres (pictured above) founded Agency, an AI-powered startup aimed at automating tasks traditionally handled by customer success managers (CSMs). These experts provide personalized support to users of complex B2B software, from onboarding and training to upselling new features.
On Wednesday, Agency announced it had come out of stealth and raised $12 million in a seed round led by Sequoia and HubSpot Ventures.
The idea for Agency was born when Torres started consulting for OpenAI in early 2023. The ChatGPT maker turned to Torres to help develop AI solutions for some of its enterprise customers, including the NBA and LiveNation. In the process, Torres realized that companies could benefit from an AI customer success manager.
When he met Brian Harrigan, co-founder and executive chairman of HubSpot, he was encouraged to build a startup around this concept. “We worked together in CRM at HubSpot, and he said to me, 'Let's work together again to build something great,'” Torres said of his conversation with Harrigan. (Harrigan has joined the agency's board of directors.)
Shortly after meeting with Harrigan, Torres contacted Sequoia partner Pat Grady, who had previously invested in Drift. Grady was immediately sold on the idea.
“It's hard to hire great CSMs. It's hard to scale great CSMs,” Grady told TechCrunch. “If you have a product that can do a lot of work for your customers, you can grow your company without hiring a bunch of CSMs. That's pretty convenient.”
Agencies can save customer success managers time by handling tasks such as scheduling, follow-ups, note-taking, customer onboarding, and meeting preparation.
Torres explained that the Agency's AI deeply understands each customer from emails, CRM data, chat messages, and phone conversations and can anticipate their needs at any given time.
“This is something we've dreamed of for a long time,” he said, and this is the goal for Salesforce, the CRM he helped build with HubSpot and Drift, to create personalized conversations for salespeople. He added that he is building a . “Until now we didn't have the technology to do this.”
The company's product is currently being tested by companies such as HeyGen and is available as an invite-only beta for customer success professionals.
While Agency appears to have no direct competitors at this time, another department within the sales and marketing organization, sales development personnel, faces disruption from dozens of AI-powered solutions.
“No one else is targeting this market,” Sequoia's Grady said. “I hope people don’t find out about it for a while and have some room to escape.”