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Elias Torres has accomplish a spate for somebody who immigrated to the U.S. from Nicaragua at 17 without knowing any English . He served as a VP of engineering at HubSpot before co - founding Drift , a companionship thatsold to Vista Equityfor about $ 1.2 billion in 2021 .
“ It ’s very uncommon to get this far , but I ’m not done , ” Torres told TechCrunch .
About a yr ago , Torres ( image above ) founded Agency AI , an AI - powered inauguration designed to automatise tasks traditionally handle by client winner manager ( CSMs ) . These pro provide individualized support to substance abuser of complex B2B software , range from onboarding and training to upselling new characteristic .
On Wednesday , Agency is coming out of stealth and announcing that it raised a $ 12 million seed round direct by Sequoia and HubSpot Ventures .
The idea for Agency was born when Torres pop consult for OpenAI in early 2023 . The ChatGPT maker postulate Torres for assist developing AI solutions for some of its enterprise client , including the NBA and Live Nation . In the class of doing that , it occurred to Torres that companies could profit from AI client success managers .
He was encouraged to establish a inauguration around this conception when he suffer with Brian Halligan , co - founding father and executive director chairman of HubSpot . “ We worked together on the CRM at HubSpot , and he told me , ‘ Let ’s construct something slap-up together again , ’ ” Torres said about his conversation with Halligan . ( Halligan joined Agency ’s table . )
in brief after meeting with Halligan , Torres reached out to Sequoia partner Pat Grady , who had previously invested in Drift . Grady was straightaway betray on the melodic theme .
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“ It ’s hard to hire cracking CSMs . It ’s laborious to scale great CSMs , ” Grady severalize TechCrunch . “ If you have a product that can do a lot of the work on their behalf , and you could scale your company without having to hire an army of CSMs . That ’s reasonably utile . ”
Agency can relinquish up time in the customer succeeder manager ’s workday by handling tasks such as scheduling , follow - ups , note - taking , customer onboarding , and meeting homework .
Torres explained that Agency ’s AI gains a cryptic intellect of each client from emails , CRM data , chat message , and telephone set conversations , which allows it to look for customer needs at any point .
“ This is something that we ’ve been woolgather about for a long prison term , ” he allege , adding that this was the goal of Salesforce , the CRM he avail build at HubSpot and Drift , which was work up individualize conversation for salespeople . “ We did n’t have the technology to do this until now . ”
The company ’s ware is currently being try out with companies , including HeyGen , and is available in an invite - only beta for customer achiever professionals .
While Agency seems to have no direct competitors at present , another subroutine within the sale and marketing organization , sale development representative , is facingdisruption from dozensof AI - powered solution .
“ I do n’t jazz anybody else going after this grocery , ” Sequoia ’s Grady said . “ Hopefully people wo n’t discover that for a while , and they ’ll have a small bit of room to run . ”
