Parag Agrawal, the former Twitter CEO who was famously fired by Elon Musk in 2022, just raised another $100 million for his new venture. Parallel Web Systems closed a Series B led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, and Khosla Ventures, at a $2 billion valuation. That's nearly triple the $740 million valuation from its Series A just six months ago, bringing total funding to $230 million. The company also recently made its search MCP server freely available, allowing developers to use it without an account or API key.
Parallel builds dedicated web search infrastructure for AI agents. Agrawal's bet from 2023: agents will use the web far more often than humans, so they need a separate access layer independent of browsers. Use cases include deep research tasks like investment analysis, insurance claims processing, and government contract retrieval — work humans can do, but agents can do faster and at scale.
Sequoia partner Andrew Reed joins Parallel's board. He sees the company's growth directly tied to the rise of "long-running agents" — autonomous agents that operate in the background for extended periods while maintaining context. Web search is the core shared capability for these agents. AI legal startup Harvey is a customer; co-founder Gabe Pereyra says hooking an agent up to the web isn't as simple as plugging in a search engine — Harvey needs granular control over which sites its agents can and cannot access.
Parallel has about 50 employees and over 100,000 developers using its infrastructure. Competitors include Tavily and Exa. Before founding Parallel, Agrawal served as Twitter's CTO and then CEO until Musk's acquisition closed.