Today, the homepage of those same founders’ new company reads: “High Performance Remote Desktop.”

The words read slightly differently. The core concept is the same.

Those founders are Benjy Boxer and Chris Dickson. NextView was an early investor in Parsec, their previous company, which delivered that low-latency streaming to gamers and creative professionals, which was acquired by Unity for $320M in 2021. Today Benjy and Chris are announcing Phaze, and we are proud to be backing them a second time.

Investing behind a founder a second time is a deliberate act on both sides. The first time, you are underwriting a bet on people you have come to believe in. The second time, you both already know exactly what you are getting. Benjy and Chris chose to run at this pursuit again, clear-eyed about how hard it is, and they chose to invite us to come along again. That mutual, informed choice is its own kind of conviction.

Their pedigree is real, and Parsec settled it. What makes Phaze remarkable is that they have come back to build, from scratch, towards a similar vision they set out to build the better part of a decade ago.

The machines that creative and technical professionals depend on are leaving the desk. Companies buy them for individual employees and size them for peak demand, then leave them idle for much of the day. One large manufacturer can have 30K workstations at more than $10K each, hundreds of millions of dollars of hardware. So that compute is moving into racks, data centers, and the cloud, where it can be shared. Once the machine lives somewhere else, the connection to it becomes everything. Phaze is that connection: a remote desktop fast enough that compute sitting in a data center feels like it is sitting under your desk.

Benjy and Chris learned to build this in the most punishing arena there is. Gaming forgives no lag, and a remote desktop fast enough for a gamer clears a bar most workflows never approach. Parsec proved that performance. But performance is necessary, not sufficient. When COVID pushed Parsec into companies almost overnight, the demand was undeniable and the product was still built for consumers. The years since were spent learning everything an enterprise needs wrapped around the performance: provisioning, machine management, security, and support. Some of the very choices that made Parsec great for gamers became the hardest things to unwind for the enterprise. Building Phaze from scratch, Benjy and Chris get to put the enterprise first, from the first line of code.

The set of people who need this functionality keeps growing. As AI works its way into everyday software, work that once ran fine on a basic laptop now needs a GPU behind it. And the users are no longer all human. One employee may run several agents at once, each needing a computer of its own, and no company can buy a dedicated workstation for every one of them. Those machines need to be allocated on demand and returned to the pool when the work is done.

Phaze essentially turns workstations into infrastructure. IT can assign machines as a shared resource, a person or agent can use one from anywhere, and the compute returns to the pool when the job is done. IT’s own agents can even help fix an employee’s machine. Over time, that can make a dedicated high-end computer unnecessary for most people.

Phaze is announcing its round and launching today, with an $8.75M round led by another returning investor, Andreessen Horowitz, including NextView investing alongside. The company opened to general availability earlier this week.

The last few years of AI have been about knowledge work. The next few will be about the compute underneath all of it, and about who, or what, gets to use it. The machines are moving off the desk. Benjy and Chris are building the way in, and we are glad to be with them for it a second time.