Phaze Raises $8.75 Million Seed Led by a16z

Park City, Utah — November 4, 2026

Remote desktop infrastructure startup Phaze has announced an $8.75 million seed funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from Indie, NextView, Makers, and Lerer Hippeau.

Co-founded by Benjy Boxer and Christopher Dickson—the team behind high-performance remote access pioneer Parsec that was acquired by Unity in 2021 for $320 Million—Phaze is built to turn expensive, underused corporate workstations into shared infrastructure on demand for both human employees and AI agents.

A Single Remote Desktop for People and AI

While most AI agents operate strictly through APIs, command lines, or basic browser extensions, many real-world enterprise workflows require full desktop environments, specialized operating systems, or heavy GPU power (such as 3D design, CAD, and software development).

Phaze solves this by offering a high-performance remote desktop layer that makes a remote machine feel local. Key capabilities include:

AI Agent Access via MCP: Through a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, computer-use agents can remotely connect to, operate, and interact with software on company-managed machines without needing dedicated software installed locally.
Background Operation & Collaboration: Agents can execute tasks on a separate computer in the background while employees work locally. Authorized human workers can also jump directly into an active agent session to help troubleshoot, then hand control back.
Optimized Hardware Pooling: High-end workstations often cost upwards of $10,000 and frequently sit idle. Phaze lets IT teams pool these machines as shared infrastructure, dynamically assigning and reassigning hardware as human or machine demand fluctuates.
Enterprise-Grade Governance: Features full authentication, directory sync, role-based controls, and audit logging to ensure AI agents strictly inherit existing corporate security and access policies.

The Investor Perspective

Reflecting on the round, Martin Casado, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), who leads the firm's infrastructure investment practice, shared his enthusiasm for backing the founders for a second time:

Martin Casado, General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz

"We’re thrilled to invest in Phaze. Phaze is a high-performance remote desktop solution for giving humans and agents a local-like experience on remote workstations. It’s the best solution for interactive, latency-sensitive workloads, and it was designed from the ground up for working with agents, which makes compatibility, management and administration seamless... We’re very excited to be working with this team again to bring desktops and applications to agents. And of course to humans too."

Next Steps

Phaze will use the new capital injection to expand its engineering team, accelerate product development, and scale customer growth.

For more information, visit phaze.app.