Former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal’s AI search startup, Parallel Web Systems, is deepening its partnership with the world’s largest search company.
Agrawal founded Parallel over two and a half years ago to help AI agents search the web. Now, Google will offer Parallel to cloud customers who are building AI agents with the Gemini model, giving Parallel access to Google’s vast clientele.
Investors like Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins back Parallel. It has raised $230 million to date, and last reported a valuation of $2 billion in April.
Agrawal said he started Parallel after becoming obsessed with the idea that AI agents would eventually search the web exponentially more than humans — and would need a different way to do so.
While traditional search engines prioritize webpages that are easy for people to read, Parallel retrieves information for AI models, including material buried deep within documents.
As AI agents take on more work, equipping them with up-to-date information has become crucial. That process, known as grounding, is what Parallel and other startups like Exa are trying to solve.
Google Cloud president and chief revenue officer Matt Renner told Business Insider the Parallel partnership reflects its strategy of giving customers choice. While Google has its own grounding tools, businesses may prefer different products depending on the use case.
Parallel is available on other clouds beyond Google, including Amazon Web Services. Agrawal said the Google relationship goes beyond distribution, marking “our deepest technical integration with a hyperscaler model lab to date.”
Parallel has built much of its product on Google Cloud since day one. And in recent months, engineers from both companies have worked to bring together tools from both companies so customers don’t have to build those connections themselves, Agrawal said.
Parallel has landed major customers like the legal AI startup Harvey, which uses Parallel’s search tools to give its AI models access to current web information alongside customers’ internal data.
