I’ve been watching Parag Agrawal build Parallel Web Systems before most people knew it existed. First Round Capital invested in Parallel’s seed round, and I’ve personally known Parag for over a decade. He’s a singular technical mind, and one of the best company builders I’ve ever worked with. He has a unique ability to envision technology 2-3 years away that will have disproportionate value. When we invested in January 2024, Parag made a few bets that felt early at the time: agents would eventually use the web far more than humans, and the best way to build for that was to go deep on infrastructure and systems rather than chase the AI labs. He was right, and his bets are proving out faster than any of us expected. And it shows in the companies trusting Parallel to run their most critical workflows. Harvey, Notion, Clay, Profound, Opendoor, Modal, Baseten and over 100,000 developers — from AI-native startups to regulated enterprises — all building on Parallel. Today, Parallel announces its $100M Series B at a $2B valuation, led by Sequoia Capital, more than doubling in five months from the Series A. Proud to have been there from day one. A lot more ahead. More details below.
Parag's bet on deep infrastructure is exactly the kind of execution the space needs right now. When you're in the trenches building heavy AI systems—like high-fidelity video synthesis models—you quickly realize that the surrounding infrastructure is often the actual bottleneck. A web built for human latency fundamentally breaks when agents try to execute at scale. Solving that underlying structural problem creates a massive moat. Huge congrats on an incredible milestone!
Parallel is crushing it. They just hired Yang You as Head of Design too!
Congrats Todd!
Read about the funding in The Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/cio-journal/ex-twitter-ceos-ai-startup-raises-funds-at-2-billion-valuation-63c927fc Watch Parag join TBPN at 1:30pm PT Learn more about Parallel (they’re hiring!): https://parallel.ai/