Ghost Raises $11M to Sell $3,499 Core PC Running Local AI Agents

Ghost, a startup founded by 19-year-old Zain Javaid, emerged from stealth with an $11 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz and a $3,499 personal computer called Core, TechCrunch reported. Abstract, Audacious Ventures, SV Angel and Nova also joined the round.

Core ships with an Nvidia RTX Pro 4000 SFF Blackwell GPU bundled into the price. There is no screen; users drive it through a phone or app. Three models come preinstalled: Qwen-3.8-Next, Qwen-3.8-27B and Gemma-4-31B. Preorders open Monday, and the first units are scheduled to ship the last week of October.

Javaid describes Core as a 'brain in a box' and pitches it as a hedge against sending personal data to third-party model providers. 'All of the source code, logic, and model weights live on the device, not the services,' he told TechCrunch, adding that 'the user owns all of it... everything is stored, run, and processed on the device.' On the alternative of just running models on a normal PC, he is dismissive: 'You can run models on existing hardware, but it's a terrible experience on many levels.'

The obvious question is what happens when Apple or Microsoft ships something comparable. Javaid's answer is flat: 'If we can't do that, Apple isn't the reason we failed.' The founding team is almost as striking as the pitch: Nicholas Chua, 19; Yifei Chen, 24; and Gautam Sharda, 23, building the units out of a San Francisco facility. Core lands into a thick news beat our tracker has been following all quarter, with 429 agents stories and 425 funding stories logged in the last 90 days.