Former Twitter CEO ousted by Musk raises $100 million again: building a dedicated search engine for AI agents

According to Beating Monitoring, Parallel Web Systems, founded by former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, has completed a $100 million Series B funding round led by Sequoia Capital, valuing the company at $2 billion. Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, and Khosla Ventures also participated. The company only just completed a $100 million Series A round in November last year (valued at $740 million). Within six months, its valuation nearly tripled, and total funding reached $230 million.

What Parallel is doing is building dedicated web search infrastructure for AI agents. Agrawal’s 2023 assessment is that in the future, agents will use the web far more frequently than humans, so they need an access layer separate from browsers. Typical scenarios include “deep research” tasks such as investment research, insurance claims, and government contract searches—these are things humans can do as well, but agents can do faster and at a larger scale.

Sequoia partner Andrew Reed has joined the board. He believes Parallel’s growth is directly tied to the rapid development of “long-cycle agents” (agents that can run autonomously in the background and maintain context over long periods), and that web searching is the core shared capability for this type of agent. AI law firm Harvey is one of its clients. Co-founder Gabe Pereyra said that enabling agents to search the web isn’t as simple as just plugging in a search engine—Harvey needs fine-grained control over which websites the agent should access and which it should avoid.

Parallel currently has about 50 employees, and more than 100,000 developers are using its infrastructure. Competitors in the same space include Tavily and Exa. Agrawal was removed from his position at the end of 2022 due to Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, having previously served as Twitter’s CTO.