Felicis

Klaviyo Acquires Agency, Hires Elias Torres as CPO

Klaviyo has agreed to acquire the team, proprietary software and intellectual property of Agency, an AI-native customer success startup founded in 2023 that had raised $32 million from investors including Sequoia, Menlo Ventures and Felicis. The transaction, with terms undisclosed, is expected to close in Q3 2026 and the Agency team (about 25 people) will join Klaviyo after closing. Agency co-founder Elias Torres will become Klaviyo’s Chief Product Officer, reporting to co-founder and co-CEO Andrew Bialecki, and will lead Klaviyo’s agent product line, including Composer and Customer Agent. Klaviyo says the acquisition will accelerate its AI-driven customer experience efforts as it aims to scale the combined agent products to hundreds of thousands of businesses, leveraging infrastructure that stores over nine billion consumer profiles.

Runlayer sues Rippling over alleged product cloning

Runlayer, a startup that provides a secure Model Context Protocol (MCP) gateway, has filed a lawsuit accusing HR software company Rippling of stealing its product idea and misusing confidential information shared during an extended product trial. Runlayer says it shared roadmap and source code under an NDA and a trial agreement that barred copying; after a year of collaboration the companies failed to agree on price and Runlayer ended the trial. Runlayer alleges a Rippling insider confirmed an internal project to build a near-identical clone and claims trade secret misappropriation, unfair competition and breach of contract. Rippling confirmed it is launching its own MCP gateway and denies the IP misuse allegations. Runlayer has retained Sullivan & Cromwell. The dispute highlights commercial and IP risks when selling enterprise AI infrastructure into larger tech customers.

Supabase Raises $500M at $10.5B Valuation

Supabase, a database and backend platform used to build AI applications, raised $500 million in a funding round that values the company at $10.5 billion including the new capital. The round was led by GIC and included investors such as Accel, Y Combinator, Craft, Felicis, Coatue and Stripe. Supabase, founded in 2020 by CEO Paul Copplestone and CTO Ant Wilson, provides Postgres-based backend tooling and has grown to about 250,000 customers and roughly 350 employees. The company said AI-assisted coding tools (notably Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex) now generate the majority of databases on its platform. Supabase also previewed a new scaling tool called Multigres aimed at supporting very large deployments.