At 19, founder raises $11M for Ghost, maker of a $3,499 computer for personal AI

Ghost revealed its first product, Core, after a year of development and an $11 million seed financing led by Andreessen Horowitz. The startup, founded by Zain Javaid with co-founders Nicholas Chua, Yifei Chen, and Gautam Sharda, says Core is a dedicated personal computer built to run continuously operating AI agents that can perform tasks, act as assistants, and reason about a user’s life.

Core is priced at $3,499 and includes an Nvidia RTX Pro 4000 SFF Blackwell GPU as part of the unit, according to the company. Ghost bundles that GPU so buyers do not need to purchase it separately, and the device comes with its own software layer, browser, and filing system. Preorders for the initial batch open Monday, with shipping planned for the last week of October.

The device is described by Ghost as a screenless "brain in a box" that users access through a phone or app; voice interactions are handled via the Core app rather than the device itself. Core ships with three preinstalled models — Qwen-3.8-Next, Qwen-3.8-27B, and Gemma-4-31B — and users can add models from Hugging Face or load their own trained models. Ghost also plans over-the-air updates to keep models current, with users able to opt in or enable automatic updates.

On privacy and resilience, Javaid said models, personal memory, and data run locally on the device and are encrypted so that no cloud provider or third party, including Ghost, can "meaningfully access" them. Ghost said it is building a firewall to monitor outgoing network requests and block or flag actions if an agent attempts unsanctioned operations using credentials. The company currently assembles units at a San Francisco facility and says the device is designed to continue functioning even if Ghost ceases operations.