Ghost Raises $11M Seed for $3,499 Core Personal AI Computer

Ghost, a startup led by 19-year-old chief executive Zain Javaid, emerged from stealth on Monday, 5 October 2026, with an $11 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz and a $3,499 computer called Core that is built to run personal AI agents around the clock. Abstract, Audacious Ventures, SV Angel and Nova also joined the round, TechCrunch reported.

Core is a screenless box that users reach through a phone or web app. Javaid described it to TechCrunch as a "brain in a box" and said the idea is to centralize a person's data, from desktop files to apps and smart home devices, in one machine dedicated to agents that can act on that person's behalf.

What the Ghost Core AI computer includes

Ghost's product page lists an Nvidia RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell SFF Edition GPU with 24 GB of GDDR7 ECC memory and 432 GB/s of memory bandwidth, a six-core AMD Ryzen 5 7600 processor, 64 GB of DDR5 RAM and a 1 TB NVMe SSD, rated at 770 AI TOPS. The enclosure is stainless steel with a brushed silver finish, and Ghost lists a one-year warranty, a 30-day return window and free shipping for the first batch.

The GPU is bundled into the price, Javaid told TechCrunch, and the device runs its own software layer, browser and filing system. TechCrunch reported that Core ships with three models preinstalled, Qwen-3.8-Next, Qwen-3.8-27B and Gemma-4-31B, while Ghost's product page also lists Muse-Glimmer-30B. Users can install other models from Hugging Face or load models they have trained themselves.

Updates arrive over the air. "As new models or improvements to existing models come out, we can push out over-the-air updates, similar to how Tesla works," Javaid told TechCrunch, adding that users can switch on auto-updates to stay on the latest generation of a given model.

Why Ghost keeps agents and data local

Ghost's central argument is ownership. In its first post on X, quoted by SiliconANGLE, the company said a system with that much access to a person's life "should not live on infrastructure someone else owns." Javaid told TechCrunch that models and personal memory run locally and that personal information is encrypted so that no cloud provider or third party, including Ghost, can meaningfully access it. SiliconANGLE added that the user holds the encryption keys, and described the founders' view that agents running on cloud servers controlled by large companies are fundamentally flawed.

The company is also building a firewall that limits how an agent can use credentials such as logins and passwords. According to Javaid, it monitors every outgoing network request and, if it sees the agent taking an action or sending out data it should not, rejects the request and flags it for the user to review. Users can also decide how much autonomy their Core agents get.

Longevity is part of the pitch too. "All of the source code, logic, and model weights live on the device, not the services," Javaid said, and TechCrunch reported that the device is programmed to keep working if Ghost shuts down.

Funding, team and early demand for Core

TechCrunch reported that Javaid worked as a quant before ChatGPT's release in 2022 pushed him toward personal AI, and that his founding team includes Nicholas Chua, 19, Yifei Chen, 24, and Gautam Sharda, 23. The team spent a year building before launch and assembles the units at its San Francisco facility.

Preorders for the first batch opened Monday, with shipping scheduled for the last week of October, according to TechCrunch. SiliconANGLE reported that the first batch has already sold out, within hours by its account, and that Ghost is now inviting people to register interest in a second batch without saying when more orders will open.

Javaid also described the proactive behavior Ghost is aiming for. In his example, Core might warn a user they could be getting sick after noticing an elevated resting heart rate, a late night of work in their computer history and the fact that it is flu season in San Francisco. He told TechCrunch he was not worried about incumbents such as Apple, arguing that much of what Core tackles is software: how the model reasons over a user's life, how it remembers, how it acts and how it knows when to reach out.

Where Core sits among local AI computers

Other companies are also selling hardware and software that keep agents close to the user. PromptCrates has covered Perplexity's portable computer built on Nvidia's DGX Spark, Perplexity's hybrid compute approach that keeps sensitive AI work on device and Qwen3.8-27B putting frontier-class local agents on a desktop, one of the model families Core ships with.

Asked how Core differs from a Mac Mini, which some people set up to run AI tools, Javaid told TechCrunch that Core's hardware and software were built specifically for running agents with models already installed, while the Mac Mini is a general-purpose computer that can be configured for AI. Voice mode is available, but users speak into the Core app rather than to the box itself, TechCrunch reported.

Ghost has not said how many units were in the first batch or when the second batch will ship. Javaid said the company's main focus is building a product people love. "If we can't do that, Apple isn't the reason we failed," he told TechCrunch.

• TechCrunch: At 19, founder raises $11M for Ghost, maker of a $3,499 computer for personal AI
• SiliconANGLE: AI agent hardware startup Ghost, led by its 19-year-old founder, raises $11M
• Ghost: Core product page
• PromptCrates: Perplexity ships Portable Computer, a local-first agent on DGX Spark
• PromptCrates: Perplexity Hybrid Compute keeps sensitive AI on device
• PromptCrates: Qwen3.8-27B puts frontier-class local agents on a desktop