Remember Parag Agrawal? Ex-Twitter CEO Fired By Elon Musk Quietly Raises $100M For His AI Startup

• Parallel Web Systems has raised $100 million in a round led by Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures.
• The deal values the startup at $740 million.
• Agrawal launched Parallel in early 2023, months after he was fired as CEO of Twitter following the company’s acquisition by Elon Musk.

AI startup Parallel Web Systems, Inc., founded by former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, has raised $100 million in a series A round led by Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures, the executive announced in an X post on Wednesday.

The move underscores the unwavering investor optimism for AI and its expanding ecosystem of applications and services. Industry leaders, including OpenAI, Perplexity, and Elon Musk’s xAI, are racing to scale their offerings, while major tech firms have pledged to ramp up AI spending next year.  

The deal values the two-year-old startup at $740 million, Reuters reported. Parallel Web offers systems for artificial intelligence (AI) models and AI agents to autonomously search, fetch, verify, and organize information from the Internet.

Its APIs retrieve and structure real-time web content for AI applications, catering to a fundamental shift as users increasingly turn to AI bots instead of traditional search engines.

Enterprise customers use Parallel to power AI agents that write software code, analyze customer data for sales teams, and assess risk for insurance underwriting—areas where high-quality web data, alongside internal systems, is critical, Agrawal told Reuters in an interview.

The new capital will be used for development and customer acquisition, Agrawal said.

Todd Jackson, a partner at VC firm First Round —one of the early investors in Parallel — said the startup is building “world-class web infrastructure specifically designed for AI agents.” In an X post, he outlined how the problem requires unique approaches to crawling, indexing, and retrieval, given that AI, and not a human, is the end user.

“Companies on the frontier of building with AI (like Clay, Sourcegraph, Owner, Starbridge, and Actively), are using Parallel’s APIs to power a wide range of use cases, from GTM workflows to helping lawyers find precedent and insurers underwrite claims,” said Jackson, who is also a former Twitter colleague of Agrawal.

The Palo Alto-based company had earlier raised $30 million from Silicon Valley venture capital firms, including Khosla Ventures. Parallel launched its first products in August this year.

Agrawal is best known for his 11-year tenure at Twitter, during which he served as CTO and CEO. He became the CEO in November 2021 after Twitter founder Jack Dorsey stepped down. He was fired, along with several other senior managers, after Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022.

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