Elias Torres has achieved lots for somebody who immigrated to the United States from Nicaragua at age 17 without knowing any English. He served as VP of Engineering at HubSpot before co-founding Drift, an organization that sold to Vista Equity in 2021 for about $1.2 billion.
“It’s very rare to get this far, but I’m not done yet,” Torres told TechCrunch.
About a yr ago, Torres (pictured above) founded Agency, an AI-powered startup with the goal of automating tasks traditionally handled by customer success managers (CSMs). These professionals provide users of complex B2B software with personalized support starting from onboarding and training to upselling latest features.
On Wednesday, the agency broke cover and announced it had raised a $12 million seed round led by Sequoia and HubSpot Ventures.
The idea for Agency got here about when Torres began consulting for OpenAI in early 2023. The ChatGPT maker asked Torres to assist develop AI solutions for a few of its enterprise customers, including NBA and LiveNation. Torres got here up with the concept corporations may benefit from AI customer success managers.
He was encouraged to construct a startup around this idea when he met Brian Halligan, co-founder and CEO of HubSpot. “We were working on CRM together at HubSpot and he told me, 'Let's construct something great together again,'” Torres said of his conversation with Halligan. (Halligan joined the agency's board.)
Shortly after meeting Halligan, Torres contacted Sequoia partner Pat Grady, who had previously invested in Drift. Grady was immediately sold on the thought.
“Hiring great CSMs is difficult. It’s hard to scale great CSMs,” Grady told TechCrunch. “If you could have a product that may do plenty of the work for them, and you’ll be able to scale your enterprise without having to rent a military of CSMs. That’s pretty useful.”
The agency can save time in the client success manager's day-to-day work by handling tasks similar to scheduling, follow-up, note-taking, customer onboarding, and meeting preparation.
Torres explained that the agency's AI gains a deep understanding of every customer from emails, CRM data, chat messages and phone conversations, allowing it to anticipate customer needs at any time.
“We've been dreaming of this for a very long time,” he said, adding that that is the goal of Salesforce, the CRM he helped construct at HubSpot and Drift that builds personalized conversations for sales reps. “We haven’t had the technology to do that before.”
The company's product is currently being tested with corporations including HeyGen and is out there in an invite-only beta for customer success professionals.
While the agency doesn’t currently appear to have any direct competitors, one other function inside the sales and marketing organization, the sales development representative, is facing disruption from dozens of AI-powered solutions.
“I don’t know anyone who’s going after this market,” Sequoia’s Grady said. “Hopefully people won’t notice for some time and may have a bit leeway.”
