Ghost has emerged from stealth after a year of building, announcing an $11 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Other investors in the round include Abstract, Audacious Ventures, SV Angel and Nova.
The company's first product is Core, a personal computer designed specifically for AI agents that can take actions on a person's behalf. According to founder and CEO Zain Javaid, the idea is to centralise a person's data, from desktop content to apps to smart home devices, into one piece of hardware designed to continuously run AI agents.
Core costs $3,499 and includes an Nvidia RTX Pro 4000 SFF Blackwell GPU bundled into the price, Javaid said. It has its own software layer, browser and filing system, and can continuously process information and tasks without constant prompting. Pre-orders for the first batch open Monday, with shipping scheduled for the last week of October.
Javaid described Core as a "brain box" without a screen, accessed through a phone or app. Voice mode is available, but users must speak into the Core app rather than the box itself. Three models come preinstalled: Qwen-3.8-Next, Qwen-3.8-27B and Gemma-4-31B. Users can also install other models from Hugging Face or load their own trained models.
Asked how Core differs from a Mac Mini, Javaid said Core's hardware and software were built specifically for running AI agents, with models already installed, while the Mac Mini is a general-purpose computer that can be configured for AI. He said the company can push over-the-air updates as new models or improvements are released, similar to how Tesla works, and that users can turn on auto-updates.
Javaid said the models and personal memory run locally, and that all personal information is encrypted so that no cloud provider or third party, including Ghost, can meaningfully access it. He said users can control how much autonomy they give their Core agents, and that the device is programmed to keep working if Ghost shuts down. He said the team is also building a firewall to limit how the agent can use its credentials.
The founding team includes Nicholas Chua, 19, Yifei Chen, 24, and Guatam Sharda, 23. The team currently builds the units at its San Francisco facility.