Ex X CEO Parag Agrawal returns to the spotlight with a $30 million AI bet

Former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal makes a high-profile return with Parallel, a real-time AI research platform that has raised $30 million and is already gaining traction among top AI firms.

By Storyboard18| Aug 16, 2025 9:59 AM

Executives like Agarwal had said Musk showed “special ire” toward them after he took over Twitter in 2022. Musk also publicly vowed to hold back their severance to recoup about $200 million from the $44 billion deal, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court in northern California. (From left to right: Parag Agarwal and Elon Musk. Image source: Moneycontrol)

Nearly three years after being dismissed from Twitter in the wake of Elon Musk’s turbulent $44 billion acquisition, former chief executive Parag Agrawal is re-emerging on the Silicon Valley scene — this time with his own artificial intelligence venture.

Agrawal is the founder of Parallel Web Systems Inc., a Palo Alto-based start-up focused on AI-driven cloud infrastructure. Launched quietly in 2023, the company has already raised $30 million from an elite group of venture capital firms, including Khosla Ventures, Index Ventures and First Round Capital. Parallel has grown to a staff of 25 and is already handling millions of automated research queries each day for a growing roster of early adopters — among them, Mr. Agrawal says, some of the fastest-growing companies in the AI sector.

Parallel’s core offering centers on enabling AI systems to perform real-time research on the public internet — supplementing large language models’ static training data with live, verifiable information. Agrawal likens the tool to giving AI “a browser of its own” — one that can cross-check responses and gauge its own confidence levels.

The platform is powered by eight purpose-built “research engines,” calibrated for different needs. The fastest engine can surface results in under a minute, while its most advanced engine, called Ultra8x, can run searches for up to 30 minutes. According to benchmarks such as BrowseComp and DeepResearch Bench, Ultra8x has outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-5 and even human researchers by more than 10 percent.

The technology is already finding commercial traction across a variety of sectors. Coding assistants can pull live code from GitHub; retailers can monitor competitor product listings; analysts can convert online customer reviews into structured datasets. The company has rolled out three developer APIs, including a low-latency version tailored for chatbots and conversational AI agents.

Parallel marks a significant re-entry for Agrawal, who became a central figure in the legal and corporate saga that unfolded during Mr. Musk’s contentious takeover of Twitter in 2022. After being ousted, he stepped back from public view — turning instead to research and hands-on development work. That period, he says, led him to focus on one of AI’s biggest challenges: grounding machine learning models in real-time, trustworthy information.

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