{"id":375185,"date":"2025-11-13T04:58:19","date_gmt":"2025-11-13T04:58:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/375185\/"},"modified":"2025-11-13T04:58:19","modified_gmt":"2025-11-13T04:58:19","slug":"ex-twitter-ceo-agrawals-ai-search-startup-parallel-raises-100-million","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/375185\/","title":{"rendered":"Ex-Twitter CEO Agrawal’s AI search startup Parallel raises $100 million"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Krystal Hu<\/p>\n

(Reuters) -AI startup Parallel Web Systems, founded by former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, has raised $100 million to build web search infrastructure for artificial \u200bintelligence agents and fund deals with online content owners, Agrawal said in an interview.<\/p>\n

The Series \u200cA round, which values the company at $740 million, was co-led by venture firms Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures, with \u200cparticipation from other existing backers including Khosla Ventures.<\/p>\n

Parallel aims to address what it sees as a fundamental shift in internet use, as AI agents increasingly become the web’s primary users. The company builds application programming interfaces (APIs) that let AI systems<\/a> search the live web for up-to-date information to complete tasks.<\/p>\n

Agrawal said \u2060its enterprise customers use Parallel to power \u200cAI agents that write software code, analyze customer data for sales teams and assess risk for insurance underwriting – areas where high-quality web data, alongside \u200dinternal systems, is critical.<\/p>\n

“How many jobs are there where we could turn off web access and ask you to do the same job fully?” Agrawal told Reuters. “You can’t deprive an M&A lawyer from \u200bnot being able to use the web, so why would you deprive their agents?”<\/p>\n

He said he \u200cbelieved the startup’s technology was superior to built-in web search functions offered by AI-model providers.<\/p>\n

Unlike traditional search engines that rank links for humans to click, Parallel’s system returns optimized content, or “tokens,” designed to feed directly into an AI model\u2019s context window. The company says this approach improves accuracy, reduces “hallucinations”, or false information, and cuts operational costs for \u2060customers.<\/p>\n

Agrawal said the new capital will allow Parallel to \u201c\u200bgo all in\u201d on product development and customer acquisition.<\/p>\n

Some of \u200bthe funds will also go toward tackling the challenge of web content increasingly being locked behind paywalls and login barriers to prevent AI web scraping, as web owners from publishers \u200dto social media platforms see \u2060traffic decline as the rise of AI chatbots changes how people access information.<\/p>\n

Agrawal said Parallel plans to develop an “open market mechanism” – a new economic model to incentivize publishers to \u2060keep content accessible to AI systems, though he did not provide details.<\/p>\n

Founded two years ago, Parallel first launched its products in \u200cAugust 2025. The company previously raised $30 million in January 2024.<\/p>\n

(Reporting by \u200cKrystal Hu in New York; Editing by Jamie Freed)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Krystal Hu (Reuters) -AI startup Parallel Web Systems, founded by former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, has raised…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":375186,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[691,738,180530,180529,119837,70877,180528,158,67,132,68,33726],"class_list":{"0":"post-375185","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-index-ventures","11":"tag-intelligence-agents","12":"tag-khosla-ventures","13":"tag-kleiner-perkins","14":"tag-parag-agrawal","15":"tag-technology","16":"tag-united-states","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-us","19":"tag-web-search"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115540623531019608","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=375185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375185\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/375186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=375185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=375185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=375185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}