Ex-Twitter chief Parag Agrawal returns to Silicon Valley with a $30 million AI company

Nearly three years after being removed from Twitter by Elon Musk, former chief executive Parag Agrawal has re-emerged in Silicon Valley with a new artificial intelligence venture. His company, Parallel Web Systems Inc, aims to give AI systems the ability to conduct reliable, real-time research on the internet.

Founded in 2023 and based in Palo Alto, Parallel has quietly grown to a 25-member team and secured $30 million in funding from investors including Khosla Ventures, Index Ventures and First Round Capital. According to the company, its platform already handles millions of research tasks every day for early adopters, among them several fast-growing AI firms.

At the heart of Parallel’s offering is a cloud-based system that functions like a browser for AI models. Instead of relying solely on static training data, applications can use Parallel to fetch, verify and organise information from the public web, while also grading their confidence in responses.

The platform operates eight “research engines” optimised for different levels of depth and speed. Its most advanced version, Ultra8x, can run searches for up to 30 minutes and has outperformed both OpenAI’s GPT-5 and human experts in benchmarks such as BrowseComp and DeepResearch Bench, the company claims.

Parallel says its tools have wide-ranging applications, from coding assistants that can pull live snippets from GitHub, to retailers monitoring competitors’ product catalogues or analysts compiling customer reviews. Developers can also access its services through three APIs, including a low-latency option for chatbots.

Agrawal’s return marks a shift from his high-profile departure in 2022, when Musk completed a $44 billion takeover of Twitter and dismissed much of its leadership. After the episode, Agrawal began exploring AI concepts, initially considering healthcare, before focusing on improving how AI systems gather and interpret information.

Now back in the spotlight, he is positioning Parallel as a key player in the race to make AI more accurate and dependable. Speaking to Bloomberg, Agrawal predicted: “You’ll probably deploy 50 agents on your behalf to be on the internet. And that’s going to happen soon, like next year.”