He led Twitter, got fired by Musk, and built a $2 billion AI company next

Parag Agrawal led Twitter as CEO for barely a year before Elon Musk’s October 2022 acquisition of the company led to his removal, along with the rest of its top leadership. Roughly two years later, Agrawal has built an artificial intelligence infrastructure startup, Parallel Web Systems, now valued at approximately $2 billion.

Agrawal had joined Twitter in 2011 as a distinguished software engineer, when the company had fewer than 1,000 employees, and became one of its most respected engineering leaders over the following decade. He was named Chief Technology Officer in 2017 and Chief Executive Officer in November 2021, making him one of the youngest CEOs in the global technology industry at the time.

Instead of taking on another executive role after his Twitter exit, Agrawal chose to found a company from the ground up, launching Parallel Web Systems in 2023 to build infrastructure for AI applications and large-scale computing systems. Publicly reported funding information places the company’s valuation at roughly $2 billion within two years of its founding.

Agrawal secured All India Rank 77 in the Joint Entrance Examination before earning a B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay, and later completed a PhD in Computer Science at Stanford University, working as a research intern at Microsoft, Yahoo and AT&T Labs.