New York: It’s almost three years since Parag Agrawal was unceremoniously fired as CEO by Elon Musk, on the very day the latter took over the popular social media platform.
The India-born American software engineer and businessman is now back in the headlines from Silicon Valley.
Agrawal has bounced back in style with his own artificial intelligence (AI) company Parallel Web Systems Inc, a cloud platform designed for AI systems to help them conduct online research.
Agrawal, who founded Parallel in 2023, had been quietly building a 25-person team in Palo Alto.
The two-year-old company, backed by big investors like Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital and Index Ventures, has raised $30 million.
It seems Agrawal, who was involved in a bitter battle with Musk around three years ago, is back in competition with the billionaire, this time in the AI race.
According to a blog post shared by the company, Parallel’s technology is handling millions of research tasks every day for early adopters, including, what Agrawal describes as “some of the fastest-growing AI companies.”
Parallel lets AI applications tap into real-time data from the public web and put together information directly into their responses. It gives AI access to a browser that fetches information, verifies it, organises it, and ven grades its own confidence in the answer.
According to the blog, the system offers eight different “research engines” with varying speeds and depth. The fastest of those is capable of responding in less than a minute, while the most advanced (Ultra8x) can take up to 30 minutes looking for highly detailed information.
Parallel claims that Ultra8x outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-5 in independent benchmarks such as BrowseComp and DeepResearch Bench by more than 10 per cent.
“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 says.
It’s been quite a comeback for Agrawal, after the chaos of 2022 and months of battling Musk in court when he was still heading Twitter. Musk’s now-on, now-off $44 billion takeover bid of Twitter triggered a bitter fight, but when he finally completed the acquisition of the company on October 27, 2022, his first move was to sack most of Twitter’s leadership team, including Agrawal.
That hardly deterred Agrawal and put him off, as he sketched out new ideas. He reportedly considered an AI healthcare venture (via Bloomberg) initially, but kept focussing on what he thought was in urgent need — giving AI agents the ability to find and interpret information from the web.
He seems to firmly on that path now.
“You’ll probably deploy 50 agents on your behalf to be on the internet… And that’s going to happen soon, like next year,” Agarwal told Bloomberg.
