Ex-Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal’s Big AI Bet: Parallel Raises $100 Million To Reinvent How Machines Search The Web

In the world of technology, few revolutions announce themselves with loud noise. Most begin quietly—inside labs, in lines of code, or, in this case, deep inside the shifting behaviour of how machines interact with the internet. It’s this subtle but seismic shift that former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal is betting on as he builds what he believes will become the backbone of a new AI-first internet.

And now, that bet has gained powerful fuel.

Agrawal’s AI search startup, Parallel Web Systems, has raised a massive $100 million Series A, valuing the young company at a striking $740 million. The round was co-led by some of Silicon Valley’s most influential venture firms—Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures—with continued backing from Khosla Ventures, signaling strong confidence in Parallel’s mission.

But what exactly is that mission? At its core, Parallel wants to rebuild the plumbing of the web—this time, for AI agents instead of humans.

Parag Agarwal: Building the Internet’s New Infrastructure for AI Agents

Today, most internet infrastructure—from search engines to content formats—was built for human eyes. But Agrawal believes the future belongs to AI agents that navigate the web, read content, interpret information and complete tasks on our behalf.

This isn’t science fiction anymore. Across industries, AI agents are quietly taking over tasks once handled by human teams.

And this is where Parallel steps in.

The company is building APIs that allow AI systems to search the live web in real time, fetching accurate and up-to-date information to perform complex jobs. Instead of outdated or static data, Parallel gives AI access to fresh, reliable, structured web information—something existing search engines were never designed for.

Agrawal describes it as giving AI “the tools to truly understand and utilise the web the way humans do—but faster and at far greater scale.”

What Enterprises Are Already Doing With Parallel

Even in its early stage, Parallel has already found strong demand from enterprise customers. Agrawal revealed that businesses are using Parallel to power AI agents in several high-value areas:

• AI agents that write software code using real-time documentation and web data

• Sales teams analysing customer data, market signals and publicly available information

• Insurance firms assessing risk by gathering and processing web-based indicators

• And more broadly, any workflow that relies on intelligent automation powered by high-quality, current web data

In all these cases, AI agents need a constantly updating stream of information—not just internal company data. Parallel provides exactly that.

Why Parallel’s Vision Resonates Right Now

The timing of Parallel’s rise is not accidental.

AI adoption across global enterprises has exploded. Agents that once felt experimental are rapidly moving into production systems. But these agents are only as smart as the data they can access. Traditional web search wasn’t built for them. Content owners haven’t prepared licensing at scale. And AI companies lack infrastructure to fetch, filter and interpret the live web responsibly.

Parallel is trying to solve all these problems simultaneously—by rebuilding search for an AI-native world and ensuring content owners are compensated along the way.

The new funding will help Parallel accelerate product development, expand its AI-search infrastructure and strike more content licensing deals—an increasingly critical factor in the AI era.

A Quiet New Race in Silicon Valley

With this fundraise, Parallel officially enters the crowded yet critical race to define the future of AI-powered web interaction. But unlike companies building consumer chatbots or enterprise copilots, Parallel is taking a more foundational approach.

It wants to become the underlying layer—one every AI agent depends on to think, reason and act with real-time context.

Agrawal, once at the helm of Twitter during one of the platform’s most turbulent moments, now seems focused on something far more ambitious: reshaping the very fabric of how AI uses the internet.

And with $100 million in fresh capital and some of the most respected investors behind him, that ambition just got a massive push.