Parallel Web Systems, the AI startup founded by former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, has secured $100 million in Series A funding to build the next layer of internet infrastructure. The round, co-led by Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures, values the company at $740 million with continued support from Khosla Ventures and other existing investors.
With the new funding, Parallel will accelerate product development, expand its search and data infrastructure, and grow its customer base. The company was founded in 2023 and went public in August 2025, but previously raised $30 million in early 2024.
From human browsing to AI-driven web usage
Parallel Web Systems are designed for AI agents, not human users. Rather than rank search results for humans to click, Parallel creates APIs that allow AI agents to search the live web, retrieve updated information, and operate with greater precision.
The company’s business customers are already using these tools to create software, analyze sales data, and assess insurance risk. In both cases, AI relies on a combination of corporate data and modern web information, something traditional search engines weren’t designed to provide.
Unlike consumer search engines, Parallel returns “tokens” of optimized content directly to the AI model’s context window. This format reduces errors, reduces processing costs, and makes results readily available to software rather than humans.
Building a new economic model for the future of the web
The main challenge Parallel seeks to address is that as publishers and platforms react to widespread AI scraping, walls of paywalled and login-protected content rise. Without new ways to compensate content owners, Agrawal argues, the web risks losing access to the very AI systems on which it increasingly relies.
Parallel plans to build an “open market mechanism,” a framework that rewards publishers who allow AI agents to access their content. Although still in development, this idea signals a shift to a more formalized data economy, where web access is structured and mutually beneficial.
At Parallel, we believe the next era of the Internet requires new infrastructure, and we want to drive that change.
