Ghost, founded by a 19-year-old, raises $11M for $3,499 personal AI computer

Ghost, an artificial intelligence hardware startup led by 19-year-old CEO Zain Javaid, said Monday that it has raised an $11 million seed round and emerged from stealth after a year of building. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Abstract, Audacious Ventures, SV Angel and Nova, both tech outlets reported. Javaid told TechCrunch he had wanted to be a quant before ChatGPT’s 2022 release, which he said left him “fundamentally excited in a way that I never had been before.” [ 1 , 2 ]

The company’s first product is Core, a personal computer designed specifically to run AI agents that can take actions on a person’s behalf. Javaid described it as a “brain in a box” without a screen, which users access through a phone or app; voice mode is available but users speak into the Core app rather than the box. According to Javaid, the device is meant to centralise a person’s data, from desktop content to apps and smart home devices, into one piece of hardware that continuously runs agents. [ 1 ]

Core includes an Nvidia RTX Pro 4000 SFF Blackwell GPU, a chip type commonly used to run AI models, Javaid said, adding the GPU is bundled into the device price so customers do not buy one separately. He said Core has its own software layer, browser and filing system and can process information and tasks without constant prompting. TechCrunch reported the price as $3,499, with preorders for the first batch opening Monday and shipping scheduled for the last week of October, and said three models come preinstalled: Qwen-3.8-Next, Qwen-3.8-27B and Gemma-4-31B. SiliconANGLE did not report a price, shipping date or preinstalled models. [ 1 ]

Ghost frames the product around data ownership. In its first post on X, the company said an AI agent that has an intimate understanding of a user’s life should “not live on infrastructure someone else owns.” Ghost said its ecosystem is built around “personal intelligence you own.” SiliconANGLE reported that the founding team considers existing agents running on cloud servers controlled by large corporations to be fundamentally flawed, because they need access to large amounts of personal and private data. [ 2 ]

Javaid told TechCrunch in an interview that he and his co-founders decided there must be a market for a powerful, dedicated, locally hosted machine that users can install at home to run the agents that will handle their digital lives, so those agents can learn continuously and act on private data. TechCrunch reported the founding team also includes Nicholas Chua, 19, Yifei Chen, 24, and Gautam Sharda, 23; SiliconANGLE described the founders only as a team of young entrepreneurs led by Javaid. [ 1 , 2 ]