Ghost has emerged from stealth after a year of building, announcing an $11 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Abstract, Audacious Ventures, SV Angel and Nova. The company was founded by 19-year-old Zain Javaid, who previously pursued work as a quant using math and data to guide investment decisions before losing interest and turning his attention to personal AI after the release of ChatGPT in 2022, an experience he described as making him feel fundamentally excited in a way he never had been before. His founding team includes Nicholas Chua, 19, Yifei Chen, 24, and Gautam Sharda, 23.
The company’s first product, Core, is a personal computer designed specifically for AI agents capable of taking actions on a person’s behalf. Javaid said the idea is to centralize a person’s data, from desktop files to apps to smart home devices, into a single piece of hardware built to continuously run AI agents that act as an assistant, perform tasks, and understand a person’s life. He argued that while models can technically run on existing hardware, the experience is poor on multiple levels, which is what led the team to build dedicated hardware rather than software alone.
Core includes an Nvidia RTX Pro 4000 SFF Blackwell GPU bundled into its price, along with its own software layer, browser and filing system, and is built to continuously process information and tasks without constant prompting. The device costs $3,499, with preorders opening this week and shipping scheduled for the last week of October. Javaid described Core as a brain in a box without a screen, accessed through a phone or app, with a voice mode available through the Core app rather than the device itself. The computer ships with three models preinstalled, Qwen-3.8-Next, Qwen-3.8-27B and Gemma-4-31B, and users can also install additional models from Hugging Face or load their own trained models. Asked how Core compares to a Mac Mini configured to run AI tools, Javaid said Core’s hardware and software were built specifically for running AI agents with models already installed, whereas a Mac Mini remains a general-purpose computer that happens to be adaptable for that use.
Javaid said the team builds the units at its San Francisco facility, with models and personal memory running locally and all personal information encrypted so that no cloud provider or third party, including Ghost itself, can meaningfully access it. He said users can control how much autonomy they give their Core agents, and that the device is designed to keep functioning even if Ghost itself shuts down, since all source code, logic and model weights live on the device rather than on external services. The team is also building a firewall that monitors every outgoing network request from the device, rejecting and flagging any action it considers unauthorized or any attempt to exfiltrate data. Asked about competition from established tech companies, Javaid said he credits companies like Apple with strong hardware, but argued that much of what Core is tackling is a software problem, centered on how a model reasons over a person’s life, remembers context and knows when to proactively reach out, illustrating this with an example of Core notifying a user that they might be getting sick based on elevated resting heart rate, late-night computer activity and seasonal flu context. He said the company’s main focus remains building a product people genuinely want to use, adding that if Ghost fails to do that, established competitors won’t be the reason why.
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