Elias Torres has achieved a lot for somebody who immigrated to the US from Nicaragua at 17 without knowing any English. He served as a VP of engineering at HubSpot before co-founding Drift, a company that sold to Vista Equity for about $1.2 billion in 2021.
"It's very rare to get this far, but I'm not done," Torres told TechCrunch.
About a year ago, Torres (pictured above) founded Agency, an AI-powered startup designed to automate tasks traditionally handled by customer success managers (CSMs). These professionals provide personalized support to users of complex B2B software, ranging from onboarding and training to upselling new features.
On Wednesday, Agency is coming out of stealth and announcing that it raised a $12 million 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 asked Torres for help developing AI solutions for some of their enterprise customers, including NBA and LiveNation. In the course of doing that, it occurred to Torres that companies could benefit from AI customer success managers.
He was encouraged to build a startup around this concept when he met with Brian Halligan, co-founder and executive chairman of HubSpot. "We worked together on the CRM at HubSpot, and he told me, 'Let's build something great together again,'" Torres said about his conversation with Halligan. (Halligan joined Agency's board.)
Shortly after meeting with Halligan, Torres reached out to Sequoia partner Patrick Grady, who had previously invested in Drift. Grady was instantly 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 the work on their behalf, and you can scale your company without having to hire an army of CSMs. That's pretty useful."
Agency can free up time in the customer success manager's workday by handling tasks such as scheduling, follow-ups, note-taking, customer onboarding, and meeting preparation.
Torres explained that Agency's AI gains a deep understanding of each customer from emails, CRM data, chat messages, and phone conversations, which allows it to anticipate customer needs at any point.
"This is something that we've been dreaming about for a long time," he said, adding that this was the goal of Salesforce, the CRM he helped build at HubSpot and Drift, which was building personalized conversations for salespeople. "We didn't have the technology to do this until now."
The company's product is currently being tested with companies, including HeyGen, and is available in an invite-only beta for customer success professionals.
While Agency currently faces little direct competition, another function within the sales and marketing organization, sales development representative, is facing disruption from dozens of AI-powered solutions.
"I don't know anybody else going after this market," Sequoia's Grady said. "Hopefully people won't discover that for a while, and they'll have a little bit of room to run."
