Former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal's Parallel Web Systems Raises $100M for AI Search Infrastructure

Parallel Web Systems, an AI startup led by former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, has secured $100 million in funding to develop web search infrastructure designed specifically for artificial intelligence agents and to establish partnerships with online content owners, as Agrawal revealed in a recent interview.

The Series A funding round, which values the company at $740 million, was jointly led by venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures, with additional investment from existing backers including Khosla Ventures.

Parallel is addressing what it perceives as a fundamental transformation in internet usage, as AI agents increasingly become the primary users of the web. The company develops application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable AI systems to search the live web for current information necessary to complete various tasks.

According to Agrawal, enterprise clients utilize Parallel to power AI agents that perform functions such as writing software code, analyzing customer data for sales teams, and evaluating risk for insurance underwriting – areas where high-quality web data, in conjunction with internal systems, is essential.

"How many jobs are there where we could turn off web access and ask you to do the same job fully?" Agrawal stated in his Reuters interview. "You can't deprive an M&A lawyer from not being able to use the web, so why would you deprive their agents?"

Agrawal expressed confidence that his startup's technology surpasses the built-in web search capabilities offered by AI-model providers.

Unlike conventional search engines that rank links for human users to click, Parallel's system delivers optimized content, or "tokens," designed to feed directly into an AI model's context window. The company claims this approach enhances accuracy, minimizes "hallucinations" or false information, and reduces operational expenses for customers.

Agrawal indicated that the new capital will enable Parallel to "go all in" on product development and customer acquisition.

A portion of the funds will also be allocated to addressing the challenge of web content increasingly being protected behind paywalls and login barriers to prevent AI web scraping. This trend has emerged as web owners, from publishers to social media platforms, experience declining traffic due to the rise of AI chatbots changing how people access information.

Agrawal revealed that Parallel plans to develop an "open market mechanism" – a new economic model designed to incentivize publishers to maintain content accessibility for AI systems, though specific details were not disclosed.

Founded two years ago, Parallel initially launched its products in August 2025. The company previously raised $30 million in January 2024.