Ex-Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal’s Startup Parallel Bags $100 Mn Funding

Parallel Web Systems, founded by former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, has secured $100 million to construct web search infrastructure for artificial intelligence agents and fund negotiations with online content owners, Agrawal revealed in an interview.

Key Highlights

• Parag Agrawal’s startup Parallel Web Systems raises $100 million in a Series A round, valuing the company at $740 million.
• The startup provides APIs enabling AI agents to search real-time web data, improving accuracy and lowering costs.

Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures led $740 million Series A investment, which included participation from other previous backers such as Khosla Ventures.

Parallel intends to address what it perceives as a fundamental shift in internet usage, with AI agents gradually becoming the principal consumers of the web. The company creates application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow AI systems to browse the live web for current information to fulfill tasks.

Agrawal stated that its enterprise customers use Parallel to power AI agents that generate software code, analyze customer data for sales teams, and assess risk for insurance underwriting, all of which require high-quality online data in addition to internal systems.

"How many jobs are there where we could turn off web access and ask you to do the same job fully?" Agrawal explained."You can't deprive an M&A lawyer from not being able to use the web, so why would you deprive their agents?" He claimed that the startup's technology outperformed the built-in web search features provided by AI-model vendors.

According to the company, unlike traditional search engines, which rank links for humans to click, Parallel's technology produces optimized material, or "tokens," that can be fed straight into an AI model's context window. This strategy enhances accuracy, eliminates "hallucinations" or misleading information, and lowers operational costs for consumers.

Also Read: Former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal Unveils AI Venture, Deep Research API

Agrawal stated that the fresh funding will enable Parallel to "go all in" on product development and client acquisition. Some of the funds will also be used to address the issue of web content becoming increasingly locked behind paywalls and login barriers to prevent AI web scraping, as web owners ranging from publishers to social media platforms see traffic decline as the rise of AI chatbots alters how people access information.

Parallel, according to Agrawal, intends to establish a "open market mechanism," a new business model to incentivize publishers to keep information accessible to AI systems, although he did not elaborate. Parallel, which was founded two years ago, will initially debut its products in August 2025. The company had previously raised $30 million in January 2024.