Former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal’s Parallel Web Systems raises $100 million at $2 billion valuation: report

Parallel Web Systems, a startup founded by former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, has raised $100 million in a Series B funding round led by Sequoia Capital, taking its valuation to $2 billion, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.

Existing investors including Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures also participated in the round.

The Palo Alto-based startup, which builds infrastructure for artificial intelligence (AI) agents to search and interact with the web, has now raised about $230 million in total. Its previous $100 million Series A round in November had valued the company at $740 million.

Agrawal said the company plans to deploy the fresh capital to expand its sales and marketing teams, while continuing to invest in research and development and target enterprise customers.

Parallel’s core bet is that autonomous AI agents, software systems capable of completing tasks on behalf of users, will increasingly rely on the web as their primary interface.

Andrew Reed, who will join Parallel’s board as part of the deal, said the company’s traction is tied to the rise of long-running AI systems. “One of the things that is a core shared function amongst all of these long-horizon agents is the ability to use the web,” Reed said, as quoted by WSJ.

Parallel said it currently supports over 100,000 developers across startups and enterprises. It is competing with a growing set of players, including Tavily and Exa, in what investors see as a large emerging market around AI agent infrastructure.

Agrawal, who served as CEO of Twitter before being ousted following Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform in 2022, said the company is focused on rapid iteration as it scales.

“Every few weeks, we solve one bottleneck and hit another somewhere,” he said. “We’re building some things I’m really excited about. I wouldn’t work here if I wasn’t.”