Ex-Twitter CEO’s AI Startup Raises Funds at $2 Billion Valuation

The round was led by Sequoia Capital, and boosts the Palo Alto, Calif., startup’s valuation to $2 billion. Existing investors including Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures also participated.

Parallel, which has developed a platform for AI agents to search the web, has about 50 employees. Its prior funding round was a $100 million Series A last November, which valued the company at $740 million. The startup has raised $230 million in total.

Agrawal, Parallel’s founder and CEO, said the startup plans to use its latest cash infusion to build out a sales and marketing team, as well as grow its research and development function. The roughly three-year-old company is also using the funding to continue targeting enterprise clients.

Parallel’s platform is dedicated to servicing AI agents—the autonomous bots that can take action on behalf of humans—and allowing them to most efficiently and accurately search the web to complete tasks. The bet Agrawal said he made in 2023 was that “agents will use the web a lot more than humans,” and therefore need their own infrastructure to access it.

AI agents might need to search the web for tasks including investment and risk underwriting research, insurance claims processing and digging through government contracts—many of which fall under the category of “deep research.” Those are also activities humans would typically open a web browser to do, but AI agents can accomplish them faster and at a much greater scale, Agrawal said.

Andrew Reed, a Sequoia partner who joins Parallel’s board as part of the deal, said the startup’s recent traction can be tied to the rapid development of “long-horizon” or “long-running” AI agents. Such agents can operate autonomously in the background and maintain context for longer periods, but churn out user requests much faster.

“One of the things that is a core shared function amongst all of these long-horizon agents is the ability to use the web,” Reed said.

And, these agents are starting to become the norm among large enterprises, Reed added.

AI legal startup Harvey is using Parallel’s platform to support its own AI agents, which automate many research-heavy legal tasks on behalf of customers, said Gabe Pereyra, Harvey’s president and co-founder.

While enabling AI agents to search the web seems like an easy fix, it isn’t a simple matter of “giving the models google search,” Pereyra said. Harvey requires more granular control over which websites its AI agents should be accessing, which Pereyra said Parallel allows it to do.

Parallel said it has over 100,000 developers using its infrastructure, including AI-native startups and enterprises.

The startup is part of a cohort of other companies, including Tavily and Exa, which are targeting the same area—one that Reed calls an “obviously” big market for supporting AI agent technology.

Agrawal was CEO of Twitter until late 2022, when he was ousted by Twitter-acquirer Elon Musk. He served as Twitter’s chief technology officer before stepping in as CEO in 2021, following co-founder Jack Dorsey’s departure.

At Parallel, Agrawal said he has an ambitious growth plan to expand its products and customer base over the next year.

“Every few weeks, we solve one bottleneck and hit another somewhere,” he said. “We’re building some things I’m really excited about. I wouldn’t work here if I wasn’t.”

Write to Belle Lin at belle.lin@wsj.com