Ghost, founded by 19 year old Zain Javaid and three co-founders, raised $11 million in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, according to TechCrunch and Renascence. Co-founders Nicholas Chua, 19, Yifei Chen, 24, and Gautam Sharda, 23, joined him, and additional investors Abstract, Audacious Ventures, SV Angel and Nova also took part in the round, TechCrunch reported.
The company's first product, called Core, is a screenless personal computer built to run AI agents continuously on a user's behalf, accessed through a phone app or voice mode, TechCrunch reported. It centralizes a person's data from desktop, apps and smart home devices into dedicated hardware rather than running agents as software on top of existing machines, according to both outlets.
Core costs $3,499, a price that includes a bundled Nvidia RTX Pro 4000 SFF Blackwell GPU, and comes preloaded with the Qwen 3.8 Next, Qwen 3.8 27B and Gemma 4 31B models, with support for installing others from Hugging Face, TechCrunch reported. Preorders opened Monday, and the first units are due to ship in the last week of October, according to TechCrunch.
"You can run models on existing hardware, but it's a terrible experience on many levels," Javaid said, according to TechCrunch. Renascence noted the price point "filters for early adopters willing to tolerate friction in exchange for status and novelty."
Dedicated hardware for personal AI agents is a bet that running models locally, continuously, beats renting compute from a cloud assistant, and investors are pricing that bet at a $3,499 entry fee before a single unit has shipped. Whether builders want a box instead of an app is the open question this preorder window will start to answer.