Ghost Emerges From Stealth With $11M Seed Led by Andreessen Horowitz to Build a $3,499 AI Computer

Ghost, a San Francisco-based hardware startup founded by 19-year-old Zain Javaid, has emerged from stealth with an $11 million seed funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, as first reported by TechCrunch Venture (https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/05/at-19-ghost-founder-raises-11-million-to-build-a-3499-computer-for-your-personal-ai/). The round also included participation from Abstract, Audacious Ventures, SV Angel, and Nova. Ghost spent the past year developing Core, a dedicated $3,499 personal computer designed to run autonomous artificial intelligence agents locally.

Javaid, a former quantitative finance worker who pivoted to personal AI following the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, founded the company alongside Nicholas Chua, 19, Yifei Chen, 24, and Guatam Sharda, 23. The team currently manufactures the devices at its San Francisco facility. Pre-orders for the initial batch opened Monday, with customer deliveries scheduled to begin during the final week of October.

Core is designed as a screenless desktop unit that users interact with through a companion smartphone app or through voice input routed through the mobile software. To handle on-device AI workloads, the machine includes an Nvidia RTX Pro 4000 SFF Blackwell GPU bundled into its retail price. The hardware operates on custom software that includes its own browser, file system, and background execution layer designed to run tasks continuously without requiring constant user prompts.

The computer comes preinstalled with three open AI models: Qwen-3.8-Next, Qwen-3.8-27B, and Gemma-4-31B. Users can download additional models from Hugging Face or load custom-trained weights directly onto the machine. Ghost plans to distribute model updates over the air, allowing users to configure automatic updates or select new model generations manually.

To safeguard personal data, Ghost built Core to process and store information locally on the physical hardware. Personal records are encrypted so that outside cloud vendors, third parties, and Ghost cannot access them. According to Javaid, the machine is also architected to continue functioning independently if Ghost ceases operations, because all source code, execution logic, and model weights reside on the local unit. The company is also developing an on-device firewall to monitor outbound network requests and prevent agents from misusing credentials or unauthorized data exfiltration.