Ex-Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal is back with his new AI Startup: All the details

Parag Agrawal

Nearly three years after being ousted from Twitter by Elon Musk, former CEO Parag Agrawal has made a strong comeback to Silicon Valley with a new artificial intelligence venture. Agrawal, who was fired in October 2022 after Musk’s $44 billion takeover of Twitter, is now the founder of Parallel Web Systems Inc, an AI-focused cloud platform that has already drawn significant attention and funding.

Founded quietly in 2023, Parallel has raised $30 million from prominent investors including Khosla Ventures, Index Ventures, and First Round Capital. The startup is headquartered in Palo Alto and has grown to a 25-member team. Despite its relatively recent formation, Parallel is already handling millions of research tasks daily for a variety of early adopters, including some of the fastest-growing AI companies in the world.

At its core, Parallel enables AI systems to conduct real-time online research. Instead of relying solely on static training data, applications integrated with Parallel can fetch, verify, and organize information directly from the public web. Agrawal describes the system as giving AI “a browser of its own” — one that can cross-check answers and even measure its own confidence levels.

The platform is powered by eight specialized “research engines,” each optimized for different use cases. The fastest delivers results in under a minute, while the most advanced engine, Ultra8x, can spend up to 30 minutes conducting in-depth searches. According to independent benchmarks such as BrowseComp and DeepResearch Bench, Ultra8x has even managed to outperform OpenAI’s GPT-5 and human experts by over 10%.

Parallel’s versatility makes it useful across industries. For instance, AI coding assistants can extract live snippets from GitHub, retail companies can track competitors’ product listings, and analysts can compile customer reviews into structured data. Developers also have access to three APIs, including a low-latency version designed specifically for chatbots and conversational agents.

Agrawal’s return to the tech spotlight is notable after the intense legal and corporate drama of 2022, when he clashed with Musk over the Twitter acquisition. Instead of retreating, he immersed himself in research and coding, eventually zeroing in on the need to make AI more reliable in real-time information gathering.