Parallel Web Systems
Building web search and research infrastructure specifically designed for AI agents. Creating systems and infrastructure for AIs to use the web effectively for completing complex tasks, with a focus on keeping the web open, transparent, and competitive for all AI systems.
Founding Story
Parallel Web Systems was founded in 2023 by Parag Agrawal (former CEO and CTO of Twitter) and Travers Nisbet following Agrawal's departure from Twitter in late 2022 after Elon Musk's acquisition. The founding team, which includes veterans from Twitter, Google, Airbnb, Stripe, Waymo, and Kitty Hawk, recognized that the primary user of the web was changing from humans to AI agents. They spent two years in development building infrastructure specifically optimized for how machines consume information rather than how humans browse. The company's vision is to build the web's infrastructure for its second user - AI agents - ensuring an open, transparent, and competitive web accessible to all AIs while providing data owners with incentives to continue publishing on the open web.
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Leadership
Founders
Parag Agrawal
Former CEO and CTO of Twitter (2021-2022). Previously held roles at Twitter as Chief Technology Officer (2017-2021), Distinguished Engineer, and Software Engineer (2011-2017). Led Project Bluesky at Twitter. PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University (2012), MS in Computer Science from Stanford, BTech in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (2005). Research internships at Microsoft Research and Yahoo! Research. Gold medal winner at International Physics Olympiad (2001).
Travers Nisbet
Co-founder and Head of Product at Parallel Web Systems. Previously worked at Chime in banking strategy and partnerships. Former consultant at McKinsey. Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from University of Virginia. Fellow at The Fellowship.
Executive Team
Parag Agrawal
Co-founder and CEO
Former CEO and CTO of Twitter. PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University. Previously distinguished engineer at Twitter, led Project Bluesky.
Travers Nisbet
Co-founder and Head of Product
Former McKinsey consultant, worked in banking strategy and partnerships at Chime. Bachelor of Science from University of Virginia. Fellow at The Fellowship.
Business Model
Revenue Model
Consumption-based infrastructure provider for AI agents and web data processing. Revenue is generated through pay-as-you-go API usage priced per request rather than per token, with tiered complexity levels (Lite to Ultra8x) allowing users to select compute intensity based on task requirements. Enterprise channel sales through AWS Marketplace enable pre-committed spend agreements. Additional revenue from enterprise custom pricing with volume discounts and dedicated support.
Pricing Tiers
Run up to 16,000 requests for free. Qualified startups can receive up to $250 in free credits.
Best for basic info retrieval
Simple web research
Complex research
Very complex research with 2x compute
Exploratory research
Extensive deep research
Advanced research with 2x compute
Advanced research with 4x compute
Advanced research with 8x compute
Includes 10 results per request. Additional results: $1 per 1,000 results
Webpage content extraction
Web-researched LLM completions
Tracking web changes
Entry-level structured dataset creation
Standard structured dataset creation
Advanced structured dataset creation
Professional structured dataset creation with highest recall
Volume discounts, custom data retention agreements, Data Protection Agreement (DPA), custom rate limits, early access, dedicated technical support, AWS Marketplace availability
Target Markets
- AI-first startups building agent platforms
- Enterprise software companies integrating AI capabilities
- Financial services (investment analysis, market research)
- Insurance companies (claims processing, underwriting)
- Sales and marketing teams (lead enrichment, CRM data)
- Software development (coding assistants, documentation)
- AI sales agents that research leads and enrich CRM data
- Coding agents that synthesize context from documentation and debug issues
- Investment tools that find alpha in SEC filings and financial data
- Insurance companies automating claims with web-sourced verification
- Private equity fund market segment analysis
- Market research and competitive intelligence
- Day AI
- Gumloop
- Lindy
- Amp
History & Milestones
Introduced research models with Basis for the Parallel Chat API
Reached 50 employees and powers millions of daily requests
Introduced structured outputs for the Monitor API
Added authenticated page access for the Parallel Task API
Released real-time fact checker built with Parallel and Cerebras
