Parabola
Parabola is an AI agent platform for operations and finance teams. Describe a recurring process in plain language and Parabola builds the agent that runs it, showing every step's input, logic and output, with a full run log.
What is Parabola?
Parabola calls itself the AI agent platform for ops and finance teams, and the framing matters: it is built for the messy, recurring process rather than the one-off question. You describe a manual routine the way you would explain it to a colleague, the Prowork assistant asks clarifying questions grounded in ops and finance use cases, and it assembles a visual agent, step by step.
The design choice that sets Parabola apart is where the thinking happens. The reasoning takes place once, while the agent is being built; from then on the same fixed logic is replayed, from the first run to the five-hundredth. Every step displays its input, its logic and its output in language a business team can read, and changing one step updates everything downstream without re-prompting from scratch. The agent doubles as documentation: your SOP writes itself.
Connectivity is broad, with more than 1,000 data sources covering ERPs, data warehouses, email and file storage, and 77 named third-party connectors including NetSuite, SAP S/4HANA, Shopify, Snowflake, Salesforce, ShipBob, Flexport, UPS, FedEx, DHL, QuickBooks Online and Coupa. Agents run autonomously on an hourly, daily or weekly schedule or on a trigger, with automatic retries, an email alert when a run fails and a log of every execution. Any table can become a chart, dashboard or shareable report that refreshes as the data does.
Typical work includes inventory reconciliation, carrier invoice auditing, multichannel sales consolidation, variance analysis, three-way matching and accrual calculations. Governance is treated as a first-class concern: granular permissions, Viewer, Editor and Admin roles, one-click rollback through version history, audit logging, SSO and SAML, and SOC 2 Type II.
Parabola positions itself explicitly against general-purpose agents, whose logic it describes as a black box that loses context and fails silently. It trains no models of its own and relies on third-party LLMs bound by DPAs. The homepage claims 30,000+ agents in production, 25M+ agent runs, 200M+ in invoices and spend handled, 1.5B+ manual tasks automated, 1T+ rows processed and a 4.9-star G2 rating. Parabola Labs, Inc. is based in San Francisco, led by founder and CEO Alex Yaseen, with roughly 44 people listed on its About page. The product is web-only, plus an MCP server for driving Parabola from third-party AI tools.
What it does
- Describe a recurring process in plain language and get an agent that runs it
- Connect an ERP, a data warehouse, email, file storage and over 1,000 other data sources
- Reconcile data across several systems and flag every discrepancy
- Extract structured data from PDFs, invoices, receipts and packing slips
- Schedule runs hourly, daily or weekly, or fire them from a trigger
- Turn any table into a chart, a dashboard or a shareable report
- Keep full version history and audit logs, and get an email alert naming the step that failed
When to use Parabola / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Parabola is the right fit.
When to use Parabola
- Operations teams with no developer on hand who repeat the same manual process every week or every month
- Finance teams running month-end close: accruals, budget-versus-actual variance analysis and three-way purchase order, receipt and invoice matching
- Ecommerce and supply chain teams reconciling data that drifts apart across an ERP, a WMS, a storefront, spreadsheets and supplier emails
- Logistics and back-office teams auditing carrier invoices against a rate card, consolidating multichannel sales or digitising invoices, receipts and packing slips in variable formats
- Audit-conscious teams that need recurring reporting to update itself and to prove how it ran, through version history, run logs and a living SOP
When not to use Parabola
- Teams working with health data under HIPAA, payment card data under PCI DSS or GDPR Article 9 special categories, which the terms prohibit outright and for which Parabola states it is not a HIPAA Business Associate
- Organisations bound by an EU data residency requirement, since hosting is in the United States only with no European option
- Anyone expecting a mobile app or an on-the-go companion, as Parabola is a web product with no iOS or Android release
- People looking for a one-off answer to a single prompt: the tool is explicitly aimed at the repeated process, not the one-time piece of reasoning
- Individuals under 16, and solo buyers who want to purchase a Business plan online rather than through a sales team and a guided rollout
How to use Parabola
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Create a free account on the Basic plan, which gives you one user, 1,000 credits and limited AI
- Describe the process you want to automate to the assistant, the way you would explain it to a colleague, or start from a pre-built prompt in the use-case library
- Answer the assistant's clarifying questions, which are grounded in ops and finance use cases
- Review the visual agent it generates, where each step carries its own input, logic and output
- Connect your sources: ERP, data warehouse, email, SharePoint, spreadsheets, or a REST or GraphQL API using a bearer token, basic auth or OAuth 2.0
- Adjust any step you want to change; everything downstream recalculates without re-prompting from scratch
- Publish a visualisation or a report, called an artifact, and share it with the team
- Schedule the run, hourly, daily, weekly or on a trigger, and set the failure alerts
- Share the agent with granular permissions; Viewer, Editor and Admin roles come with Business plans
- Watch version history and audit logs as the agent runs, and roll back to an earlier version in one click if needed
Pros & Cons
Pros
- The logic is fixed and replayed identically on every run, where a general-purpose agent re-reasons each time; when a run does fail, an email names the step that broke instead of failing silently
- Every step is inspectable in plain language, input, logic and output, and the agent doubles as living documentation of the process
- Auditability end to end: version history with one-click rollback, audit logs and data tracing
- Change one step and the rest of the agent recalculates, with no rebuild and no re-prompting from scratch
- Very broad connectivity, including the messy sources real teams live with: supplier emails, SharePoint and PDFs
- No code required, so the business team keeps ownership of its own process, and a permanent free plan with no cap on the number of agents you can build
- A clear, documented position on AI, with no training on customer data by Parabola or by its providers, plus named subprocessors, an available DPA and SOC 2 Type II
Cons
- No public pricing beyond the free tier: Business plans go through a quote and the price of additional credits is not published
- Credit consumption depends on how complex your agents are and how often they run, which makes cost hard to estimate before you start
- The free Basic plan is capped at one user, 1,000 credits and restricted AI, and Business plans are clearly sized for teams rather than a lone user
- Hosting is in the United States only, with no EU data residency option and no Article 27 GDPR representative named
- No mobile app, and the interface and documentation are in English only, with no additional languages announced
- Contractually off-limits for HIPAA health data, PCI DSS card data and GDPR Article 9 special categories, with liability capped at USD 50 on free and beta offerings
- Flow data is kept for only 14 days, so this is not a data warehouse, and there is no ordinary contact page: first contact goes through a demo request form
Pricing & Plans
Parabola operates on a freemium model. A free plan is available: the Basic plan, listed at zero in the site's structured data, includes one user, 1,000 credits and limited AI capabilities, and may be used indefinitely. Beyond it, no price is published. Additional credits may be purchased on a pay-as-you-go basis at an undisclosed rate, and Business plans are quoted individually with a credit allowance tailored to actual usage. Credits are consumed when agents run rather than when they are built, so a complex task such as multi-page PDF extraction consumes more than a simple agent; there is no cap on the number of agents that may be created, and every plan includes a monthly credit allowance. The terms provide for free, monthly or annual subscriptions, with invoices payable within 30 days, a late penalty of 1.5% per month and fees that are non-refundable except in specified cases.
- free
- one user
- 1
- 000 credits
- limited AI
- with additional credits available on a pay-as-you-go basis
- Basic includes the Prowork agent builder
- self-service running and adjusting of agents
- pre-built integrations
- and community support through documentation
- templates and the community
- quote-based
- with credits tailored to actual usage and no published price
- Business includes onboarding by Parabola's Automation Engineers for training and rollout
- a proof of concept on production data
- native integrations at scale plus custom integrations
- role-based access control with Viewer
- Editor and Admin roles
- version history with rollback
- centralised integration governance
- enterprise security (SSO
- many Business customers started on the free plan
- weekly active users up 100% to 150% after launch
- and 100+ hours saved in the first month
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Parabola handles your data.
GDPR overview
GDPR compliance is documented rather than merely asserted. Parabola Labs, Inc. names itself as controller under European legislation and offers a Data Protection Agreement presented as meeting the GDPR's adequacy and security requirements; the text is published at /legal/dpa and the page was last updated on 30 March 2026. The privacy policy sets out legal bases for processing in a table and covers access, rectification, erasure and objection to direct marketing. A Data Protection Officer is designated, reachable at privacy@parabola.io or the San Francisco address. CCPA is handled in a section for California residents, where Parabola states it does not sell data, and the service is not directed at under-16s. Subprocessors are named. Security controls include SOC 2 Type II, encryption in transit and at rest, and regular third-party penetration tests. One gap: the section headed 'Controller, Data Protection Officer and EU Representative' names no Article 27 representative.
Who owns the data?
Parabola's terms are unambiguous on ownership. As between the parties, the customer retains all intellectual property and other rights in the Customer Data it provides, and that data is treated as the customer's Confidential Information. Parabola and its licensors keep the rights to the Service, its underlying technology, and the templates, formats and dashboards it supplies. Parabola may generate Usage Data and use it to operate, improve and support the Service, and for analytics, benchmarking and reporting. Customer feedback and suggestions may be used without restriction or obligation. The security page states plainly that Parabola does not sell any customer data, and that step outputs are never sent to analytics subprocessors.
Reuse rights
Because the customer keeps its rights in Customer Data, that data can be reused freely without asking Parabola for permission. On Parabola's side, data processed by the platform is used for one purpose: running the customer's own flows. Parabola does not train its own AI models on customer data or on any other data, and the third-party LLM providers it uses, OpenAI and Anthropic, are bound by DPAs that contractually prohibit them from using the contents of anything sent through Parabola's AI steps as training data. Minimisation is built into the design: only the columns the user selects are sent to the AI provider, never the whole dataset. Names and email addresses collected at sign-up, together with usage data, are shared with analytics subprocessors, but business data loaded into flows never is. Subprocessors are published by name: Amazon Web Services for cloud, Anthropic and OpenAI for AI and internal tooling, Daytona and Modal for processing infrastructure, Extend for optional document parsing, Kernel for browser automation as a paid option, Pubnub for application events and Sendgrid for email. The privacy policy has been in force since 4 February 2024.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Parabola runs fully on Amazon Web Services, with servers hosted in the United States, and AWS provides the physical and network security of those servers. The architecture sits inside an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud with subnets segregated by security level and firewalls restricting network access, while IAM policies enforce a least-privilege model. Database connections run through the VPC on private subnets. Data is encrypted in transit with 256-bit encryption and TLS 1.2+ on API and application endpoints, and at rest with AES-256. Passwords are stored as irreversible hashes and never in clear text, and access tokens and integration credentials sit in a separate table with tighter access. All web integrations use HTTPS, with OAuth preferred whenever the third-party service offers it, and Parabola publishes a list of IP addresses so you can allowlist it on the third-party side. One detail worth knowing: the domain's resolved IP geolocates to Switzerland, but that is a CloudFront distribution node, not a storage location. There is no European hosting option.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Parabola.
- The real cost is unpredictable before you start, since neither the price of credits nor the price of Business plans is published
- Credits are consumed on every run, so an agent scheduled hourly costs far more than a monthly one; check the frequency you actually need before you build
- Hosting is exclusively in the United States, with no EU data residency option and no Article 27 GDPR representative named despite the platform targeting international companies; verify this against any residency requirement first
- Use with HIPAA health data, PCI DSS card data and GDPR Article 9 special categories is contractually prohibited, and Parabola explicitly states it is not a HIPAA Business Associate
- Flow data is retained for 14 days at most: do not mistake Parabola for a data warehouse or a system of record
- Liability is capped at USD 50 on free and beta offerings and at amounts paid over 12 months otherwise, Parabola may terminate the agreement for any reason with a refund of unused prepaid fees, and it may use Usage Data for benchmarking and reporting
- AI features rely on OpenAI and Anthropic, so the columns you select do leave for those third parties even though they are not used for training, while Kernel for browser automation and Extend for document parsing are optional subprocessors enabled only on request; and there is a human risk too, since a process that runs itself can quietly erode the team's hands-on understanding of it if nobody reads the logs
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Low for the intended audience. No code is required, since you describe the agent in plain language; the site's promise is automating without engineers. Sign-up on the free plan is immediate, and pre-built integrations connect with no development, using OAuth wherever the third-party service supports it. Difficulty sits where those integrations stop: configuring API steps (REST or GraphQL, bearer, basic auth, OAuth 2.0) and database connections. Business plans include Automation Engineers who build the first agents with you. Documentation, Parabola University, a SOP community, demo videos and a pre-built prompt library complete the on-ramp.
Deployment
Integrations
Behind Parabola
Fundraising
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Alternatives
Tools that compete with or complement Parabola.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Parabola built for?
What is the difference between the self-serve and Business plans?
How does credit-based pricing work?
Is there a free trial?
Can I start self-serve and move up later?
Does Parabola train AI models on my data?
Where is my data hosted and how long is it kept?
Is a DPA available and are subprocessors disclosed?
Is there an API, and is there a mobile app?
What security certifications does Parabola hold?
Should you pick Parabola?
Parabola is a mature product rather than a launch-week experiment: the company dates back to around 2016, the domain to 2015, roughly 44 people are listed on the About page, and the backers include Thrive Capital, Matrix and OpenView Partners. Named customers such as Uber Freight, WHOOP, Ruggable and ShipBob stand in for anonymous logos.
The positioning is deliberately narrow, and that is a strength. Parabola is not trying to be a general assistant; it wants to own the repeated ops or finance process, and it optimises for the thousandth run rather than the demo. The main pay-off is traceability: you can open any step and read its input, logic and output, roll back through version history, and hand an auditor a complete run log. For a month-end close or a carrier invoice audit, that is worth more than raw model cleverness. The AI stance is equally documented: no training on customer data, by Parabola or its named providers.
The main weakness is pricing opacity. The free plan is genuinely permanent, but beyond it nothing is published: extra credits are pay-as-you-go at an undisclosed rate and Business plans require a quote. Since credits burn on every run, an hourly agent costs materially more than a monthly one, and that is hard to model in advance.
One structural constraint stands out: hosting is United States only, with no European data residency option and no Article 27 representative named, which blocks some EU projects whatever the DPA and SOC 2 Type II on offer. Health, payment card and Article 9 data are contractually out of scope.
If your team repeats a spreadsheet-and-email routine every month and has to prove how it ran, Parabola is a strong fit. Start on the free plan and measure credit consumption before you commit.
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