Ex-Twitter chief Parag Agrawal launches new $30M startup Parallel, betting on AI smarter than ChatGPT-5

Economic Times

2 days ago

Synopsis
Parag Agrawal, the former CEO of Twitter, has returned with a new venture called Parallel Web Systems. Founded in 2023, the Palo Alto startup builds infrastructure for AI agents to conduct web research with greater accuracy and speed. Already backed by $30 million from firms including Khosla Ventures and Index Ventures, the platform claims to outperform OpenAI's GPT-5 in benchmark tests. Agrawal says he hopes Parallel, not Twitter, will define his career as he steps back into the Silicon Valley spotlight.
Agencies Ex-Twitter chief Parag Agrawal launches Parallel, betting on AI smarter than GPT-5 Parag Agrawal, once at the helm of Twitter, is now leading Parallel Web Systems, an artificial intelligence startup that focuses on helping AI agents complete tasks on behalf of humans. The idea is to allow machines to gather, verify, and organise information directly from the web.The move comes less than three years after his abrupt dismissal by Elon Musk, who sacked him and Twitter's leadership team immediately after taking over the company. Friends and colleagues urged Agrawal to take a break. He chose otherwise.
'I'm not a person that can enjoy the beach in that moment,' he told Bloomberg. Instead, he spent his days in Palo Alto coffee shops reading research papers, sketching ideas, and writing code on his laptop.Agrawal said he had plenty of offers but most of them were unappealing. 'Clean up shit,' is how he described those roles. Having spent years building machine learning systems at Twitter, he was clear his next step would be in artificial intelligence.
His timing was notable. Just a month after leaving Twitter, OpenAI released ChatGPT, which opened the floodgates for new AI ventures. By 2023, Agrawal had founded Parallel Web Systems and quietly assembled a 25-member team in Palo Alto.
The company has already raised $30 million from investors including Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, and Index Ventures. One of the early backers is Vinod Khosla, the billionaire venture capitalist known for his bets on emerging technologies.Today, Parallel's technology is being used by early adopters, which Agrawal describes as 'some of the fastest-growing AI companies.' The system is reportedly processing millions of research tasks each day.Parallel's platform allows AI applications to search the public web in real time, verify the accuracy of what they find, and package results into clear responses. According to the company's official blog, the system includes eight 'research engines' designed for different needs.The fastest engine can deliver results in under a minute, while the most advanced, called Ultra8x, can spend half an hour digging for highly detailed answers. Parallel says Ultra8x has outperformed OpenAI's GPT-5 by more than 10 per cent in benchmarks such as BrowseComp and DeepResearch Bench.'It is the only AI system to outperform both humans and leading AI models like GPT-5 on the most rigorous benchmarks for deep web research,' the company said.Parallel says its services can support a range of industries. Coding assistants can pull snippets directly from GitHub. Retailers can track rivals' product catalogues. Market analysts can have consumer reviews organised into spreadsheets.Developers can access these tools through three different APIs, including a low-latency version built for chatbots.Agrawal's career has already seen sharp turns. A former International Physics Olympiad gold medallist, he earned a PhD in computer science from Stanford before joining Twitter in 2011. Starting out on the advertising team, he climbed the ranks to become Chief Technology Officer under Jack Dorsey. He worked on core products like Twitter's ad technology and its algorithmic timeline, before being named CEO in 2021.In 2022, he was still leading Twitter while locked in a legal battle with Musk over the $44 billion takeover bid. When Musk finally completed the purchase, his first move was to dismiss Agrawal.Agrawal briefly considered an AI healthcare project, but kept coming back to what he saw as a pressing challenge: building AI agents that could reliably search and interpret the web.'I don't think Twitter defines me. If I do a good job, I'm hoping this company will define me,' he said of his new role.Agrawal believes the future of AI lies in personal agents acting on behalf of users. 'You'll probably deploy 50 agents on your behalf to be on the internet,' he predicted. 'And that's going to happen soon, like next year,' he told Bloomberg.With Parallel Web Systems, he is betting on speed and accuracy to give him an edge in a competitive market, and perhaps a new definition of his career.