The Comeback Kid: Former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal Raises $30 Million for Artificial Intelligence Startup
- The funding was led by Khosla Ventures along with Index Ventures and First Round Capital.
Former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal has reportedly raised about $30 million in funding for an artificial intelligence startup. According to The Information, which first broke the news, Khosla Ventures led the funding in Agrawal’s company. Venture capital firms Index Ventures and First Round Capital also played a role. Although the specifics of the product and the startup’s name haven’t been disclosed, The Information noted that the startup is “building software for developers of large language models, which were popularized by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and customers of those LLMs [Large language models].”
Agrawal has kept a low profile since he was ousted in 2022, soon after Elon Musk acquired the company now known as X for $44 billion. The Indian American had replaced founder Jack Dorsey as CEO on Nov. 29, 2021. Dorsey was a long-serving engineer at the company and had previously risen to the rank of chief technology officer.
In October last year, Musk was ordered to pay $1.1 million in legal fees to Agrawal, policy lead Vijaya Gadde, and CFO Ned Segal. The trio had sued the company in April for allegedly failing to pay for their legal bills.
Before he was appointed CEO, Agrawal, an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, had spent a decade with Twitter. In 2005, he moved to the United States and enrolled at Stanford University to pursue a doctorate in computer science. “There, he joined a research group focused on databases, which let computers store and mine large amounts of digital information, The New York Times said in his profile.
He joined Twitter in October 2011 as a Distinguished Software Engineer after completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. His early work on the use of artificial intelligence to increase the relevance of tweets on Twitter timelines was well recognized. He was appointed CTO in 2017. He succeeded Adam Messinger, who left the company in December 2016.
While studying at Stanford, he worked as a research intern for Microsoft, Yahoo!, and AT&T Labs. He completed his schooling at the Atomic Energy Central School in Mumbai.
He is married to physician-scientist Vineeta Agarwal. The couple got married in January 2016, after getting engaged in October 2015. They have a son, Ansh, who was born in November 2018.