San Francisco, August 15, 2025 – Parag Agrawal, the former CEO of Twitter, has officially launched Parallel Web Systems Inc., an AI startup aimed at revolutionizing how AI agents interact with the internet.
The two-year-old company, known simply as Parallel, announced its debut on August 14, 2025, after securing $30 million in a seed funding round led by Khosla Ventures, with backing from Index Ventures, First Round Capital, and other prominent investors.
Revolutionizing AI-Web Interactions
Parallel's cloud platform is designed to power autonomous AI agents, enabling them to conduct real-time web research with unprecedented efficiency. The platform offers eight AI research engines, with its flagship Ultra8x outperforming OpenAI's GPT-5 by over 10% on benchmarks like BrowseComp and DeepResearch Bench.
These engines provide APIs for tasks such as:
- Retrieving code from GitHub for programming assistants
- Compiling competitive product data for retailers
- Providing confidence scores and citations for data verification
- Supporting customizable outputs like spreadsheets for product reviews
From Twitter to AI Infrastructure
Agrawal, who was ousted as Twitter CEO in October 2022 following Elon Musk's $44 billion acquisition of the platform (now X), has pivoted to building infrastructure for what he predicts will be a future dominated by AI-driven web traffic.
"The internet needs to evolve for machines, not just humans."
Current Traction and Future Plans
Parallel's platform already processes millions of research tasks daily for early adopters, including fast-growing AI companies. The startup plans to expand its capabilities, enabling AI agents to handle team-level workloads in hours and adapt to dynamic webpage changes.
Parallel is actively hiring engineers to develop its "parallel web" optimized for machine-generated traffic, signaling strong growth ambitions in the AI infrastructure space.
Last updated: August 15, 2025