When Parag Agrawal was abruptly removed as CEO of Twitter following Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition in 2022, it looked like a dramatic fall from grace . The quiet technocrat, handpicked by Jack Dorsey, had been ousted in one of the most public leadership transitions in tech history. Yet less than two years later, Agrawal is orchestrating one of Silicon Valley’s most compelling second acts. His AI startup, **Parallel Web Systems**, has just reached a staggering **$2 billion valuation** after raising a $100 million Series B funding round led by Sequoia Capital .

For a platform with over 500 million users in India, WhatsApp Pay processes less than 1 percent of the country’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions . This startling statistic—WhatsApp Pay holds a mere 0.65 percent market share —captures the central paradox of Meta’s Indian ambitions. The messaging app is ubiquitous, yet its payments feature remains a footnote in a market dominated by PhonePe and Google Pay, which together control nearly 79 percent of UPI volumes .