We develop a strategy making extensive use of tent spaces to study parabolic equa-tions with quadratic nonlinearities as for the Navier-Stokes system. We begin with a new proof of the well-known result of Koch and Tataru on the well-posedness of Navier-Stokes equations in R^n with small initial data in BMO^{-1}(R^n). We then study another model where neither pointwise kernel bounds nor self-adjointness are available.