Parag Agrawal's startup raises $100M to build a parallel web for AI agents

Former Twitter Inc. Chief Executive Parag Agrawal has raised $100 million to fund his new startup, Parallel Web Systems Inc., which is focused on enabling artificial intelligence agents to search the web more efficiently. Sequoia Capital led today's Series B round, bringing the startup's valuation to $2 billion. Agrawal told the Wall Street Journal that his new company will use the funds to establish a sales and marketing team and accelerate its research and development plans. The startup is building a platform that enables autonomous AI agents to perform work on behalf of humans to search the internet for information with much greater accuracy than they do now. Agrawal believes that agents will ultimately "use the web a lot more than humans," and require a different kind of infrastructure to access it properly. Parallel's solution is a programmatic web infrastructure based on a suite of specialized application programming interfaces for searching the internet, performing tasks online, extracting information from websites, and monitoring the web. The APIs use a proprietary web index that's optimized for "machine retrieval." One of the first companies to use Parallel's tools is the legal AI startup Harvey AI Inc., which has developed autonomous agents designed to perform research-heavy tasks on behalf of lawyers. Since launching in early 2024, Parallel has amassed a user base of more than 100,000 developers, including many from AI-native startups and large enterprises.

(Source：Siliconangle)