Elias Torres has accomplished much for somebody who immigrated to the US from Nicaragua at 17 with no understanding of the language. Before launching cofounding roles that led to Drift, which sold to Vista Equity for nearly $1.2 billion in 2021, he worked as a VP of engineering at HubSpot.

 "It's really hard to get this far, and I'm just not done," Torres said in an interview with TechCrunch.

About a year ago, Torres founded Agency, an AI-powered startup designed to automate tasks that have traditionally fallen to customer success managers, or CSMs. These professionals provide personalized support to users of complex B2B software - everything from onboarding and training to upselling new features.

Agency is emerging from stealth today, announcing it has raised a seed round worth $12 million. It was led by the venture arms of Sequoia and HubSpot.

Agency was born as an idea when Torres began consulting for OpenAI in early 2023. The maker of ChatGPT asked Torres to assist in the development of AI solutions for some of its enterprise customers, including NBA and LiveNation. Working on that, it struck Torres that companies would actually benefit from AI customer success managers.

He was encouraged to build a startup around this concept when he met with Brian Halligan, HubSpot co-founder and executive chairman. "We worked together on the CRM at HubSpot, and he told me, 'Let's build something great together again,'" Torres said about his conversation with Halligan. (Halligan joined Agency's board.)

Shortly after meeting with Halligan, Torres reached out to Sequoia partner Pat Grady, who had invested in Drift earlier. Grady fell in love with the idea on the spot.

It's really hard to hire great CSMs. It's really, really hard to scale great CSMs," Grady said to 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. That's pretty useful.".

Agency can free time up in the workday of a customer success manager through absorbing activities like scheduling, follow-ups, note-taking, customer onboarding and even preparation for meetings.

Torres explained that from emails, the CRM data, chat messages, and even phone conversations, each customer gains deep understanding in the AI to the point that it will anticipate every need of the customer at any point in time.

"This is something that we've been dreaming about for a long time," he said, adding that this was the goal of Salesforce, the CRM he helped build at HubSpot and Drift, which was building personalized conversations for salespeople. "We didn't have the technology to do this until now." The company's product is currently being tested with companies, including HeyGen, and is available in an invite-only beta for customer success professionals.

While Agency does not apparently have any direct competitors currently, a different type of role within a sales and marketing organization, the sales development representative, is disrupted by dozens of AI-powered solutions.

"I don't know anybody else going after this market," Sequoia's Grady said. "Hopefully people won't discover that for a while, and they'll have a little bit of room to run."