SAN FRANCISCO — In late 2022, Parag Agrawal became the face of Silicon Valley’s most public firing. Memes mocked him, critics dismissed him, and the new ownership of Twitter (now X) famously escorted him out of the building.
Agrawal didn’t clap back. He didn’t launch a podcast, write a tell-all book, or engage in public spats. He simply vanished.
Now, nearly three years later, that silence is paying dividends.
While the news of his startup, Parallel, raising $100 million first broke quietly in November, it has resurfaced this week with viral intensity. The reason isn’t just the valuation—a staggering $740 million for a company still in stealth—but the narrative of a “quiet comeback.”
Social media, particularly in the Indian tech community, has seized on the funding round as a moment of vindication. “The achievement of the decade,” one viral post read, contrasting Agrawal’s low-profile building phase with the chaotic public persona of his former employer.
But looking past the revenge narrative, the capital injection from heavyweights like Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures signals something more substantial: confidence in Agrawal’s technical thesis.
Parallel isn’t trying to build another social network. Instead, it is tackling the unglamorous but critical plumbing of the AI age. As AI agents—software that performs tasks on behalf of users—become more common, they struggle to navigate a web built for human eyes. Agrawal’s startup is reportedly building the infrastructure to let these agents “read” and interact with the internet effectively.
It is a pivot from managing human conversation to facilitating machine interaction.
“It’s classic Valley redemption,” notes an investor close to the deal. “You get knocked down publicly, you go into a cave, and you come out with a unicorn. Parag skipped the media circus and went straight to the coding.”
For the engineers and founders watching, the lesson of Agrawal’s resurgence is clear: In an attention economy, sometimes the most disruptive move is to say nothing at all and just build.
