Nearly three years after stepping down as Twitter CEO following its $44 billion acquisition by Elon Musk, Parag Agrawal has returned to the tech scene with the launch of a new AI startup, Parallel Web Systems. Serving as founder and CEO, Agrawal is spearheading an ambitious mission: to reimagine the internet for AI.
Backed by major investors including Khosla Ventures, Index Ventures, and First Round Capital, Parallel has already raised $30 million and built a core team of top engineers from companies such as Twitter, Google, Stripe, Airbnb, Chime, Waymo, and Kitty Hawk.
At the heart of Parallel’s vision is a simple but powerful concept: give AI its own browser. Unlike traditional models that depend on static training data, Parallel’s platform allows AI agents to access, verify, and organise information in real time, even calculating confidence levels before presenting results. “Agents are going to be the primary customers of the web going forward,” Agrawal said. “They will use the web a lot more than humans ever have.”
The company’s technology is already delivering results. On OpenAI’s BrowseComp benchmark, Parallel’s research APIs achieved 58% accuracy, outperforming GPT-5’s 41% and human participants’ 25%. On DeepResearch Bench, Parallel scored an 82% win rate compared to GPT-5’s 66%.
These APIs now handle millions of daily research tasks across industries. Use cases range from coding agents searching documentation and debugging, to insurance companies automating claims. The platform supports declarative interfaces where AI agents specify what they need without providing step-by-step instructions for retrieval.
Built for machine interaction from the ground up, Parallel is now exploring next-generation capabilities like long-horizon agents, event-driven architectures, and SQL-like queries over the web.
With Parallel, Agrawal is betting big on a future where the internet is optimized not just for people, but also for intelligent agents. As the company puts it, “We’re building for the web’s second user… we’re building for what’s next.”
