Ex-Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal’s AI startup Parallel raises $100 million

Former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal’s artificial intelligence startup, Parallel Web Systems, has raised $100 million in fresh funding to develop web search infrastructure tailored for AI agents and secure partnerships with online content owners.

The Series A funding round, which values the company at $740 million, was co-led by venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures, with participation from existing investors including Khosla Ventures. The funds will be used to accelerate product development, expand enterprise adoption, and explore new mechanisms for fair access to online content.

Agrawal stated in an interview with Reuters that Parallel aims to address a fundamental shift in internet usage, where AI agents are emerging as the web’s primary users. The company builds application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow AI systems to perform live web searches and retrieve real-time data required to complete complex tasks.

He informed that enterprise clients are already using Parallel to power AI tools capable of writing software code, analysing customer data for sales operations, and assessing risk in insurance underwriting, all of which depend on access to accurate, up-to-date web information in addition to internal datasets, as reported by Reuters.

Agrawal remarked that Parallel’s approach provides a more efficient and reliable alternative to built-in web search capabilities offered by large AI model providers. Unlike traditional search engines that generate ranked lists of links for human users, Parallel’s technology delivers optimised content “tokens” directly into an AI model’s context window. This, he explained, improves accuracy, minimises the occurrence of hallucinations or false responses, and reduces operational costs for enterprise customers.

The former Twitter chief said that the fresh capital would enable the company to “go all in” on scaling its technology and user base. Part of the funding will also be directed towards addressing one of AI’s biggest challenges — restricted access to online content as publishers and social media platforms place increasing portions of their material behind paywalls and login barriers to limit web scraping by AI systems.

To address this, Agrawal revealed that Parallel plans to introduce an “open market mechanism”, designed to create an economic model that rewards publishers for keeping their content accessible to AI agents, although further details on its implementation remain under wraps.

Founded two years ago, Parallel launched its first products in August 2025, after an initial funding round of $30 million in January 2024. With this latest round, the company is positioning itself at the forefront of AI-driven web infrastructure, aiming to redefine how artificial intelligence interacts with the live internet.