Ex-Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal Unveils AI Startup

Parag Agrawal, the former CEO of Twitter, now called X, has returned to the tech industry with a startup, Parallel Web Systems Inc., focused on helping artificial intelligence agents autonomously collect and analyze information from the web. 

Agrawal said in a LinkedIn post on Friday that his startup’s first major product, called Deep Research API, outperforms humans and leading AI models, including OpenAI’s GPT-5, on some research benchmarks.

“We already power millions of research tasks every day,” Agrawal said, adding that a public firm is already automating human workflows with Parallel and coding agents are using its tools to find documents and debug issues. Agrawal has raised $30 million in funding for Parallel and leads a 25-person team, Bloomberg reported on Thursday. 

Parallel marks Agrawal’s first big move in the tech space since Elon Musk ousted him and other C-level executives after the Tesla boss took over Twitter in October 2022, eventually changing the social media platform’s name to X.

The executives later sued Musk, claiming they were denied around $128 million in severance pay after their contracts were abruptly terminated. A district court ruled to move the case forward in November, but a final verdict hasn’t been reached.

Agrawal knew AI would be his next venture

Agrawal built machine learning models at Twitter while serving as chief technology officer under then-CEO Jack Dorsey. Agrawal then led Twitter from November 2021 until October 2022.

After being fired from Twitter, Agrawal told Bloomberg that he dove back into AI research, reading papers and writing code again. He said he turned down several offers from struggling tech firms looking for him to “clean up shit,” knowing that AI was what he wanted to focus on next.

AI agents, not humans, will run the internet, Agrawal says

Agrawal’s first AI idea was an AI-powered healthcare startup, but he realized that AI agents, not humans, would become the biggest users of the web.

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“There’ll be more agents on the internet than there are humans around. You will probably deploy 50 agents on your behalf to be on the internet,” Agrawal told Bloomberg. “I think that’s going to happen soon, like next year.”

AI agents the next big thing on Ethereum, Coinbase devs say

Agrawal’s bet on AI agents also lines up with recent predictions from Coinbase developers, who last week described autonomous AI agents as Ethereum’s future “biggest power user.”

Coinbase’s Kevin Leffew and Lincoln Murr said a little-used HTTP web standard, combined with Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 3009, could open a new era of e-commerce on the blockchain.

AI agents could execute stablecoin transfers without human involvement, enabling everything from self-driving taxis that pay for their fuel to AI models that monetize content on demand, the pair said.

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