From Twitter to $2B: Parag Agrawal’s Parallel Raises $100M

The Series B round, led by Sequoia Capital, funds the infrastructure that Parallel Web Systems built to enable autonomous AI agents to search the web with greater precision than conventional search tools allow.

Parallel Web Systems, the AI infrastructure startup founded by former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, raised $100 million in a Series B funding round that values the company at $2 billion, the company disclosed on April 28.

Sequoia Capital led the round. Existing investors Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, and Khosla Ventures also participated. The funding brings Parallel’s total capital raised to $230 million. Its Series A, closed in November 2025, raised $100 million at a valuation of $740 million. 

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Agrawal, who serves as founder and chief executive, said the company will use the capital to build a sales and marketing team and expand its research and development function. Parallel, which employs roughly 50 people, is also directing the funds toward enterprise customer acquisition, he said.

The company operates a programmatic web infrastructure built around a suite of application programming interfaces for searching the internet, extracting website content, and monitoring the web. Those APIs draw on a proprietary index optimized for what Agrawal describes as “machine retrieval,” structured access designed for autonomous AI agents rather than human browsers. Agrawal founded the company in early 2024, citing the conviction that “agents will use the web a lot more than humans” and that they will require dedicated infrastructure to do so. 

The use cases Parallel targets include investment and risk underwriting research, insurance claims processing, and analysis of government contracts tasks that would require a human to open a browser, but that agents can execute faster and at greater scale, Agrawal said.

Harvey AI, the legal artificial intelligence startup, is among Parallel’s early enterprise customers. Harvey co-founder and president Gabe Pereyra said access to conventional search is not sufficient for agent-grade research. Agents require more granular control over which websites they access, and Parallel provides that control, Pereyra said. 

Sequoia partner Andrew Reed, who joins Parallel’s board as part of the transaction, attributed the startup’s traction to the broader adoption of what he called “long-horizon” autonomous systems that operate continuously in the background and sustain context over extended periods.

Parallel said more than 100,000 developers are using its infrastructure, including teams at AI-native startups and large enterprises. The company competes with Tavily and Exa Labs, which are building comparable agent-facing web infrastructure. 

Agrawal served as Twitter’s chief technology officer before becoming chief executive in 2021, following co-founder Jack Dorsey’s exit. He left the company in late 2022 when Elon Musk completed his acquisition and reorganized leadership.

Disclaimer: This news is based on publicly available information. NervNow has not independently verified any claims.

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