Ghost’s ghost seed round brought in $11 million led by Andreessen Horowitz as the startup emerged from stealth after a year of building. The company is betting that buyers want a $3,499 computer built for AI agents, not a general-purpose desktop.
19-year-old Zain Javaid, Ghost’s founder and CEO, said ChatGPT’s release in 2022 changed his focus. “I felt fundamentally excited in a way that I never had been before,” he said, describing the moment that pushed him toward personal AI.
Core ships with three models
$3,499 is the price of Core, Ghost’s first product, which comes with Qwen-3.8-Next, Qwen-3.8-27B, and Gemma-4-31B preinstalled. Users can also install other models from Hugging Face or load their own trained models, so the machine starts as a ready-made system rather than a blank box.
Core includes an Nvidia RTX Pro 4000 SFF Blackwell GPU inside the purchase price, along with its own software layer, browser, and filing system. Ghost says the unit can continuously process information and tasks without constant prompting, and that the device is built to take actions on a person’s behalf.
Andreessen Horowitz backs Ghost
Andreessen Horowitz led the round, with Abstract, Audacious Ventures, SV Angel, and Nova also investing. Ghost is building the units at its San Francisco facility, and preorders for the first batch open Monday.
Shipping is scheduled for the last week of October. That puts buyers in line for a screenless device Javaid calls a “brain in a box,” but access still runs through the Core app, and voice mode requires speaking into that app rather than the box itself.
Mac Mini and Core
Javaid compared Core with a Mac Mini and said Core’s hardware and software were built specifically for running AI agents, while the Mac Mini is a general-purpose computer that can be configured for AI. He also said the models and personal memory run locally, and that all personal information is encrypted so no cloud provider or third party, including Ghost, can meaningfully access it.
Users can control how much autonomy they give their Core agents. As new models or improvements to existing models come out, the company can push out over-the-air updates similar to how Tesla works, and users can turn on auto-updates so they are always running the latest generation of a given model.
