Ex-Twitter CEO’s AI Startup Raises Funds at $2 Billion Valuation - WSJ

Ah, Parag Agrawal, the man who steered Twitter into the iceberg, is back with a fresh $100 million to build 'web search for AI agents.' Because if there's one thing we learned from his tenure, it's that he knows how to make things work smoothly. The startup, Parallel Web Systems, is now valued at $2 billion — roughly the same amount of value Twitter shed in the months before Musk took over. Investors are betting that Agrawal's vision of an AI web search will be better than... well, the existing web search that already works fine for humans.

The pitch: AI agents need their own search engine because the current internet is too messy. Yes, the solution to AI's hallucination problem is to give it a worse version of Google. What could go wrong? Meanwhile, the $100 million will go towards 'continuing to build' — which is tech-speak for hiring engineers and buying server space before the next hype cycle makes this look quaint. One can almost hear the collective eye-roll from every search engineer who's spent decades optimizing for human queries.

But let's not be too harsh. Maybe Agrawal has learned from his Twitter days and will actually deliver something that doesn't implode. Or maybe this is just another case of 'former CEO of struggling company raises absurdly large round for vaguely defined AI product because that's what the market wants right now.' Either way, the valuation is a lovely round number to put on a tombstone when the AI winter comes. Cheers, Parag.