Elias Torres Launches Agency AI to Reinvent Customer Success with Artificial Intelligence

Elias Torres is no stranger to bold ventures. From immigrating to the United States at 17 without speaking English, to becoming Vice President of Engineering at HubSpot, and later co-founding Drift—which was acquired by Vista Equity Partners for approximately $1.2 billion—Torres has already built a legacy of entrepreneurial achievement. Now, he’s back with a new mission: to transform the world of customer success management through artificial intelligence.

This week, Torres officially took the wraps off his latest company, Agency AI, which has been operating in stealth mode for the past year. The startup has already secured a $12 million seed round led by Sequoia Capital and HubSpot Ventures, signaling strong early confidence in its potential.

Agency AI is built around a sharp insight from Torres’s recent consulting work with OpenAI, where he helped develop AI solutions for major enterprises like the NBA and Live Nation. Through that experience, he realized there was a significant opportunity to streamline and scale the role of customer success managers (CSMs) using advanced AI models.

In B2B software companies, CSMs play a critical role by ensuring users are successful with complex platforms. They handle onboarding, offer training, and drive feature adoption and expansion. But as organizations grow, the challenge of scaling personalized support becomes increasingly difficult. That’s where Agency AI steps in.

The platform uses large language models to automate routine yet essential CSM responsibilities: scheduling, follow-ups, onboarding coordination, meeting preparation, and even note-taking. Agency’s AI is designed to learn from CRM data, email threads, chats, and voice calls, allowing it to anticipate customer needs and provide proactive support tailored to each client’s journey.

The idea found immediate traction with Brian Halligan, co-founder and executive chairman of HubSpot. Having worked closely with Torres on CRM solutions during their HubSpot days, Halligan quickly saw the potential and joined Agency’s board. Another early believer was Sequoia’s Pat Grady, who had previously backed Drift and saw Agency as the natural next evolution in customer engagement.

Grady put it succinctly: “It’s hard to hire and scale great CSMs. If you can automate large portions of their workload with AI, that’s a huge advantage.”

Currently, the product is being piloted with companies like HeyGen, and is in an invite-only beta for customer success professionals. While many AI startups are targeting sales development and marketing tasks, Torres’s focus on CSM automation places Agency in a niche with few, if any, direct competitors—at least for now.

For Torres, this is more than just a business opportunity. It’s the realization of a long-held vision. “We’ve been dreaming about personalized AI support for years,” he said. “Now, we finally have the technology to make it real.”

As the race to redefine enterprise AI continues, Agency AI may be pioneering a new category—one where machines don’t just assist sales and support teams, but actively collaborate with them to elevate the customer experience.

Cited: https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/16/after-selling-drift-ex-hubspot-exec-launches-ai-for-customer-success-managers/