AI agent hardware startup Ghost, led by its 19-year-old-founder, raises $11M

Ghost AI says it has raised $11 million to build what it claims is the first personal computer made specifically for running personal AI agents. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Abstract, Audacious Ventures, Nova and SV Angel also taking part.

The company is led by 19-year-old chief executive Zain Javaid, and the pitch is blunt: current AI agents live on cloud servers controlled by big companies, which is a bad fit if those agents need deep access to private life. Ghost’s answer is Core, a box meant to sit at home, keep running, and do nothing but power agents on the user’s behalf.

Core isn’t trying to be a normal PC. It has no monitor or other peripherals, and Ghost describes it as a “brain in a box.” Under the hood is an Nvidia RTX Pro 4000 SFF Blackwell GPU, along with its own software layer, file system and web browser. It ships with open-source models at launch, including Alibaba Group Holding’s Qwen-3.8, Qwen-3.8-2.7B and Google LLC’s Gemma-4-31B, and users can pull in more from Hugging Face and other repositories.

The security pitch is the real product here. Ghost says the code, logic and model weights stay on the device, not in a service, and that everything is encrypted with keys held by the user. It also built in a firewall to watch outgoing requests from the agents, so nothing is quietly sent out and no malicious actions slip through.

The first batch of Core units sold out in hours, at $3,499 each. Ghost is now taking interest for a second batch, though it hasn’t said when orders will reopen. For a startup barely out of the gate, it’s an expensive bet on a simple idea: if an AI agent knows your life, maybe it shouldn’t rent its brain from someone else.