About our Series B and Parsec’s year of transformation

For most around the world, 2020 has been a year that at its absolute best was defined by deeply uncomfortable, previously unfathomable, transformation.

As a team, we here at Parsec left our Manhattan headquarters and scattered around the world. Almost overnight, we transformed from a team committed to building a strong culture based on proximity to a fully distributed, remote-first company.

As a business, we introduced two new versions of our product: Parsec for Teams and Parsec Warp. We learned quickly that the very core of Parsec’s technology remedied many of the challenges artists, animators, engineers, editors, and architects faced when attempting to do their job remotely for the first time. The inputs and feedback from these incredible remote creative humans allowed us to introduce products and optimize Parsec for their use cases. We transformed into an Enterprise business, built on shared experience and empathy for the people suddenly forced to work remote.

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve raised a $25 million Series B, led by Andreessen Horowitz, and joined by our existing partners at Makers Fund, Lerer Hippeau, NextView Ventures, and Notation Capital. General Partner Martin Casado will be joining our board, and you can hear directly from him here.

Martin’s unique perspective and a16z’s experienced team and resources will allow Parsec to hit the gas on reaching new audiences, expanding globally, and building a world-class digital team culture. Andreessen Horowitz’s team brings invaluable expertise in both games and enterprise businesses, and we’re thrilled to be able to leverage both.

There’s little doubt that transformations brought on by 2020’s pandemic will last well into the future. We already know most people using Parsec for work have no intention of going back to a linear, five day, eight hour in-office work day. Flexibility in a day allows more opportunity to explore, create when inspiration strikes, and overcome processes, dead ends, and distractions that are inevitable in an office culture.

Plus, commutes have been eliminated, time with family is way up, mental health and self care are improving. Stanford professor Nicolas Bloom found that Americans have saved more than 9 billion cumulative hours transitioning to remote workplaces. We like to think Parsec has played a small role in creating all that time.

When we look into 2021, we’re motivated by how we can actually improve people’s work days, rather than trying to reach parity with an office experience. We’re in the earliest days of a global transformation of how things will be created. Parsec is positioned to introduce new methods of collaborating, communicating, and creating with each other. The new, remote-first cultures springing up across industries will surpass the old way of doing things in just about every way.

And we believe we’ll stop reminiscing about the ways we’ve worked and played together before, and discover that we can be a little more connected, despite being a little further apart.

Remember: we’re in the early days, the roughest version of remote work. It’s only better from here.

As a brand, we have also introduced new art and a new URL to reflect the transformation and diversification of our audience: parsec.app. We want the people using Parsec for a full range of different rationales, motivations, and use cases, to know that they belong in our community. It doesn’t hurt that we’ve got an incredible design team to keep Parsec as playful as ever.

As a piece of technology, Parsec hasn’t transformed. We’re committed to delivering the lowest latency, precise, performative connections possible between people and their technology. That means we’ll continue optimizing for our favorite graphically demanding media: video games. Supporting the needs of frame-perfect fighting games, the latest AAA graphic behemoths, and indie darling local co-op games is what lets us deliver value to every single creative industry.

Distance can’t keep the whole team from getting together

The Parsec you know and (hopefully? maybe?) love isn’t going anywhere. Oh, and we’re hiring. Come hang.