Elias Torres, who came to the US from Nicaragua at 17 without English, has accomplished much; after working as HubSpot’s VP of engineering, he co-founded Drift, which Vista Equity bought for $1.2 billion in 2021
“It’s rare to get this far, but I’m not done,” Torres told TechCrunch. A year ago, Torres (shown above) founded Agency, an AI-powered firm that automates customer success manager chores.
These experts help complicated B2B software users with onboarding, training, and feature upsells. The agency announced a $12 million seed round headed by Sequoia and HubSpot Ventures on Wednesday. The agency was conceived when Torres began consulting for OpenAI in early 2023.
ChatGPT requested Torres’ aid building AI solutions for NBA and LiveNation, its enterprise customers. Torres realized firms may profit from AI customer success managers while doing that.
After meeting with HubSpot co-founder and executive chairman Brian Halligan, he was inspired to launch a company around this idea.
Torres said Halligan urged him, ‘Let’s develop something fantastic together again,’ after working on HubSpot’s CRM. (Halligan joined Agency board.)
Torres contacted Sequoia partner Pat Grady, a Drift investor, shortly after meeting Halligan. Grady immediately agreed.
Hiring exceptional CSMs is difficult. Great CSMs are hard to scale, Grady told TechCrunch. “If your product can do a lot of the work for them, you can scale your company without hiring an army of CSMs. I find that useful.”
Agency saves time. Agency’s AI learns about each customer from emails, CRM data, chat messages, and phone calls, allowing it to anticipate customer needs at any time, Torres said.
“This is something that we’ve been dreaming about for a long time,” he said, adding that Salesforce, the CRM he helped design at HubSpot and Drift, aimed to personalize sales talks. We lacked the technology to do this till now.”
The company’s product is in an invite-only beta for customer success experts and being tested with HeyGen.
Dozens of AI-powered solutions are disrupting sales development representatives, while Agency has no direct competitors.
Grady of Sequoia remarked, “I don’t know anybody else going after this market. “Hopefully people won’t discover that for a while, and they’ll have some room to run.” in the customer success manager’s day by scheduling, following up, taking notes, onboarding customers, and preparing meetings.
