Klaviyo, Inc.
Founders
Andrew Bialecki, Ed Hallen · Founded 2012 · HQ today: Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Klaviyo was founded by Andrew Bialecki, Ed Hallen in 2012. It is now led by Andrew Bialecki.
In 2012 Andrew Bialecki and Ed Hallen, who had met through Boston's software scene, saw that online stores knew what each visitor browsed and bought but used almost none of it in their marketing. They built a database designed to store customer events and act on them, then connected it to email. Early Shopify merchants found that automated abandoned-cart and post-purchase emails paid for themselves quickly, and the product spread through word of mouth and agencies.
Software engineer who worked at Applied Predictive Technologies and Performable (acquired by HubSpot) before starting Klaviyo.
Andrew Bialecki co-founded Klaviyo in 2012 and has led it since, taking it through its 2023 NYSE IPO and past $1 billion in annual revenue in 2025. Since January 1, 2026 he has served as co-CEO alongside Chano Fernández, focusing on product, engineering and long-term vision. Andrew Bialecki was born in 1986.
Software engineer and former Applied Predictive Technologies executive.
Ed Hallen co-founded Klaviyo in 2012 alongside Andrew Bialecki. Drawing on his deep background in data analytics, he helped architect the core premise of the company: that e-commerce marketing shouldn't be based on guessing, but on directly reading massive amounts of customer transaction data. He helped build the highly advanced database architecture that made Klaviyo indispensable for Shopify merchants. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).
Chano Fernández
Co-Chief Executive Officer
As Co-CEO (joining from Workday), he provides the critical enterprise software experience required to effectively battle massive marketing titans like Salesforce and Adobe.
Amanda Whalen
Chief Financial Officer
As CFO, she steers the company's massive capital allocation strategy, attempting to maintain high growth rates while defending against incredibly fierce competition from Mailchimp and Omnisend.
Andrew Bialecki
Co-Founder & Co-Chief Executive Officer
As Co-Founder and CEO, he successfully guided the company through its massive 2023 IPO, transforming a highly niche email tool into a multi-billion dollar marketing automation behemoth.
Ed Hallen
Co-Founder & Director
As Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, he ensures Klaviyo remains vastly technologically superior to basic email senders, effectively turning it into a lightweight Customer Data Platform (CDP).
Klaviyo was founded in 2012 in Boston, Massachusetts, by Andrew Bialecki and Ed Hallen. The two engineers set out to build a database platform that made it effortless for consumer businesses to personalize 1-to-1 customer communications.
The name 'Klaviyo' is derived from the Spanish word 'clavija' (meaning a climbing piton or linchpin), symbolizing the company's mission to provide the essential foundational anchor that allows growing consumer businesses to scale to new heights.
The founders observed that while consumer apps had rich data on customer behavior (what items they viewed, added to carts, and purchased), traditional email tools treated customers as static spreadsheet rows. They built a custom event-driven database to connect real-time web actions to automated messaging.
The founders grew organically by personally onboarding e-commerce store owners on Shopify forums and Meetup groups, writing custom code integrations, and demonstrating that automated abandoned cart emails generated immediate 10x ROI on the first day.
Ed Hallen focused on user experience and product management, turning complex database queries and branching logic into intuitive drag-and-drop 'Flow' builders that non-technical marketing managers could configure in minutes.
Andrew Bialecki and Ed Hallen created one of the most successful homegrown Boston tech success stories of the 21st century, establishing Boston as a major global hub for data-driven marketing software and SaaS entrepreneurship.
It was founded by Andrew Bialecki and Ed Hallen. Their core philosophy was democratizing data. They believed that massive giants like Amazon had an unfair advantage because they had custom-built recommendation engines. Bialecki and Hallen wanted to give the exact same data-mining superpowers to a small mom-and-pop Shopify store, allowing them to compete globally.
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