After selling Drift, former HubSpot executive launches artificial intelligence for customer success managers

Elias Torres has achieved rather a lot for someone who immigrated to the United States from Nicaragua on the age of 17 without knowing English. He served as vp of engineering at HubSpot and later co-founded Drift, an organization that sold to Vista Equity in 2021 for roughly $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 startup focused on automating tasks traditionally performed by customer success managers (CSMs). These specialists provide personalized support to users of complex B2B software, from implementation and training to the sale of latest features.

On Wednesday, the Agency comes out of hiding and proclaims that it has raised a $12 million seed round led by Sequoia and HubSpot Ventures.

The idea for the Agency was born when Torres began consulting for OpenAI in early 2023. The creator of ChatGPT asked Torres to assist develop AI solutions for a few of its enterprise clients, including the NBA and LiveNation. While completing this project, it occurred to Torres that firms may benefit from the assistance of AI-powered customer success managers.

He was encouraged to construct a startup around this idea when he met Brian Halligan, co-founder and executive chairman of HubSpot. “We were working on a CRM system together at HubSpot, and he said to me, ‘Let’s build something great together again,’” Torres said of the conversation with Halligan. (Halligan joined the Agency’s board of directors.)

Shortly after meeting Halligan, Torres reached out to Sequoia partner Patrick Grady, who had previously invested in Drift. Grady immediately liked the thought.

“Great CSMs are hard to hire. Great CSMs are hard to scale,” 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. It’s quite useful.”

An agency can save time on a customer success manager’s job by handling tasks similar to planning, follow-up, note-taking, client onboarding, and meeting preparation.

Torres explained that the Agency’s AI deeply understands each customer based on emails, CRM data, chat messages and phone calls, allowing it to anticipate a customer’s needs at any given moment.

“It’s something we’ve dreamed about for a long time,” he said, adding that it was the goal of Salesforce, a CRM he helped construct at HubSpot and Drift, which built personalized conversations for salespeople. “We didn’t have the technology to do this until now.”

The company’s product is currently being tested with firms including HeyGen and is accessible in an invitation-only beta version for customer success professionals.

While Agency currently faces little direct competition, one other function within the sales and marketing organization, the sales development representative, is facing disruption from dozens of AI-based solutions.

“I don’t know anyone else who wants to pursue this market,” Sequoia’s Grady said. “I hope people don’t discover it for a while and have some space to run.”