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[Own the means of production](/essays/own-the-means-of-production)
[Rent models, own judgement](/essays/rent-models-own-judgement)
[Token Fatigue](/essays/token-fatigue)
[The Operator is the spec](/essays/the-operator-is-the-spec)
# Parallel Partners
**Based on Conviction. Built for Outcomes.**
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## Mission
Parallel makes the mid-market agentic-first.
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## The choice
The winners of the next decade won't be new companies. They'll be existing businesses with real customers and real revenue that get rebuilt in time. That's the market we work in.
So you have a choice. Rebuild yourself, or be rebuilt by whoever gets there first. As the cost of intelligence approaches zero, every business has to move from AI-absent to AI-native to stay relevant.
You could drive that transformation from the inside. Our bet is that you won't. Not because you don't want to. Not because you don't think it is necessary. But because your business has to run today.
So we put our own capital and equity in beside yours, and we do the work. It costs you attention you do not have. It costs us money we do.
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## What agentic-first means
Most operators layer AI on top of the business. The ones that win rebuild around it, with a live model of the operation at the centre and people sitting on top of it rather than inside it. Judgement, taste and customer trust stay human, and everything else becomes addressable by agents.
The advantage isn't headcount. It's the speed of the loop between signal and action. Businesses rebuilt for that move at machine speed. The rest become suppliers to the ones that did.
We sit between management consultancy and venture-building. We call it agentic venture-build.
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## Thesis: the AI supercycle is mispriced at the application layer
The economics of the AI stack are skewed. Research by Apoorv Agrawal (Stanford MS&E 435, _The Economics of Generative AI: Two Years Later_) shows **93 percent of value still sits in the semiconductor layer**.
| Layer | Share of profit | Notes |
|---|
| Semiconductor (NVIDIA-dominated) | ~70% revenue / ~79% gross profit | One-player game. $350B extra revenue in two years moved the share by almost nothing. |
| Infrastructure (hyperscalers, compute, model labs) | ~14% of profit | Margins squeezed by energy costs. |
| Application (apps, agents, organisations) | ~7% of profit, up from 3% | Where the value lands eventually. |
The cloud cycle ran the other way. Apps captured roughly 70 percent of profit, but it took fifteen years. AI may take longer. Compute costs are still not falling fast enough, and the application layer is still failing to hold value.
The split flips when the application layer builds **agentic-first companies**: strategy, product, and agents running as one system, not loose projects next to each other.
That's where we put our chips. We do not build agents next to existing work processes. We replace or rebuild those processes alongside the operator, with our own capital and our own risk in the outcome. The mid-market segment is large enough to build a portfolio in and small enough to move fast. That is the window.
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## What is Parallel Partners
Parallel Partners (PP) is an agentic venture-build firm. Based in Amsterdam, founded in 2025. We rebuild mid-market companies into agentic-first operations. We do not add AI on top of an existing process. We replace or rebuild the process alongside the operator, with our own capital and our own risk in the outcome.
We do three kinds of deals: **Transform** (we acquire the business), **Replace** (we rebuild a single work process), and **Co-build** (we build a new venture together in a joint-venture entity). We only earn through equity or revenue-share.
We sit between management consultancy and venture-building. We call it agentic venture-build.
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## Three engagement modalities
| Modality | What it is |
|---|
| **Transform** | We acquire an existing mid-market company with investors (80 to 100 percent) and rebuild it agentic-first. |
| **Replace** | We rebuild one work process inside an existing business. We earn through revenue-share or equity. |
| **Co-build** | We build a new venture with a founder inside a joint-venture entity. |
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## System focus
At Parallel we build gainfully employed systems: specialized systems with productive jobs that bring margin to the businesses that employ them. One process, one hard target, measured output.
### Parallel Agri Food
Parallel Agri Food is our first named vertical: systems for margin that compounds.
Agri and food operations run on physical constraints that software cannot argue with. Product ripens, stock spoils, and a day of delay comes straight out of the margin. That makes the target easy to state and hard to hit, which is the kind of problem a gainfully employed system is built for. We do not add an AI layer on top of the existing planning tools. We rebuild one process alongside the operator, with our own capital and equity at risk, and we are measured on what that process moves.
Compounding is the test. A system earns its place when the operator can see the margin it added, and when that gain keeps building after we stop touching it. One process, one hard target, measured output.
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## Key differentiators
- - Operators, not advisors. We do the work and carry the risk, instead of handing you a deck to implement alone.
- - We have sat in the owner's chair, so we build for it.
- - We put our own capital and equity in beside yours. We only win when you do.
- - We rebuild how the work happens, not who does it.
- - Agents are core infrastructure, not a tool added on the side.
- - Three ways in: transform what you have, replace a process, or co-build something new.
- - Your data and compute stay in Europe.
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## What we are not
- - Not a consultancy
- - Not a vendor selling AI employees
- - Not a shop billing by the hour
- - Not a tool or SaaS provider
- - Not a fund that only writes cheques
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## Purpose
Our purpose is embedded in our founding charter.
**Build the edge, keep it yours.** The thing that makes a business money usually lives in people's heads. We build it into systems instead, and those systems stay yours. Your data, your evals, your context, your alpha. The models underneath stay swappable, because the edge is knowing which one to use when, not being married to one.
**Strengthen human agency.** In a world hurtling towards AI, we believe people are still the best agents. The most powerful tool a business will ever be handed is worth exactly what the person holding it knows. So we build systems that learn from how the operator actually decides, and get better at backing them.
**Ground the business in truth.** Most companies argue about the operation from memory and opinion. We start by measuring what is actually happening, and we answer one question before we build anything: better than what, and by how much. The measure is built to outlive the model underneath it, so the business keeps improving whoever wins the next round.
**Make it a joy to use.** We have spent decades building and crafting platforms and products for the world's biggest brands, and the ones that moved the business were always the ones people actually wanted to use. Craft is what keeps the loop alive.
**Own the outcome.** We put our own capital and equity in beside yours. We only win when you do. We sit between management consultancy and venture-building. We call it agentic venture-build.
Full page: parallelpartners.ai/purpose
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## Values
| Value | What it means |
|---|
| **Originally curious** | Hungry for what we do not yet know, especially about trades we have never worked in. Humble enough to admit how much we do not know, confident enough to test received wisdom ourselves. We teach what we know. |
| **Radical openness** | Being open builds trust, holding things back builds distance. Cut out assumption and hearsay. Owning a mistake early deserves credit, not blame. |
| **Empowered judgement** | Good people are fully empowered to use their own judgement, including the ones already inside the business. Data-informed, not data-driven. The work is art and science together. |
| **Focused excellence** | We work on what is actually in our hands and refuse to be pulled around by the rest. We are judged on excellent outcomes, not on excellent process. |
| **Deliberately different** | We do not copy what the market is doing. Re-evaluate, refine, repeat. No room for mediocrity anywhere in the stack. |
| **People first** | Be kind. We are people first and operators second. Parents, partners, children, closest friends come first. Assume good intent. |
Operating principles: **We are the agents** (the intent is the operator's, the tools serve it), **Craft beauty in** (the work deserves beauty, including the parts nobody sees), **Stay charming** (being decent carries a build further than being right), **Think then relentless** (we take our time deciding, then we are relentless), **Means not end** (we build with agents because they work, not because we like them), **Ambitious and credible** (extremely ambitious, meticulous about a plan we believe ourselves), **We own it** (every task has one owner with real authority).
Full page: parallelpartners.ai/values
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## How an engagement runs
| Stage | What happens |
|---|
| Pre-intake | 60 to 90 minutes with a PP partner. Fit assessment with the client. |
| Intake | Understand the problem and the business context. Pick a modality: Transform, Replace, or Co-build. |
| Refinery | Translate requirements into an agent specification. |
| Validator | Confirm value, data, and risk are clear enough to build. |
| Foundry | Production build on the PP stack. |
| Live | Tool or product in production, monitored. |
| Metrics | Operational and business metrics on a real-time KPI dashboard. |
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## Us
We are operators, not advisors. A small team of seasoned entrepreneurs who have built and sold companies, market-makers who priced risk at machine speed, and commercial leaders who have carried real P&L. We have sat in the owner's chair, so we build for it, with our own capital and equity at stake.
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## Facts at a glance
| Name | Parallel Partners (PP) |
|---|
| Category | Agentic venture-build firm |
| Founded | 2025 |
| Headquarters | Amsterdam, The Netherlands |
| Geography served | EU & US |
| Engagement modalities | Transform, Replace, Co-build |
| Compensation | Equity and revenue-share |
| Primary market | Mid-market companies |
| Named verticals | Parallel Agri Food |
| Data residency | EU |
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## Contact
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## Essays
- - [Own the means of production](/essays/own-the-means-of-production): The cost of intelligence is collapsing for every company at once, so on its own it is no advantage. The edge is your own proprietary knowledge built into systems you control. And real enterprise AI safety is keeping that control, over your data, your models, your compute, and who gets to see your alpha, because the labs that own the model layer have every incentive to move up it and ship what you built as their next product.
- - [Rent models, own judgement](/essays/rent-models-own-judgement): The model is fungible because every competitor rents the same one. The advantage is the Loop, the captured human judgement that compounds and survives every model release. We build it for the operators who never could.
- - [Token Fatigue](/essays/token-fatigue): Enterprises bolted AI onto broken processes and the bills came due without the returns. Token Fatigue is the reckoning. The fix is a business rebuilt around the intelligence, not a cheaper token.
- - [The Operator is the spec](/essays/the-operator-is-the-spec): The mid-market runs on a person, not a process map. Horizontal AI configures around the process and cannot reach it. A vertical build is shaped around the operator and compounds on their P&L.
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_Last updated: 2026-09-10_
