Ghost raises $11M to build a $3,499 screenless ‘Core’ box for personal AI at home

Ghost has stepped out of stealth with a fresh seed round and a very specific bet: people will buy a dedicated machine just for AI agents. The startup raised $11 million, led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Abstract, Audacious Ventures, SV Angel, and Nova also in the round. It has spent a year building in secret before this launch.

The company’s first product is Core, a $3,499 personal computer built for AI agents that can take actions for a user. Founder and CEO Zain Javaid, 19, says the point is to pull together desktop data, apps, and smart home devices into one box that can keep running in the background. No screen, no fuss, and no constant prompting. You use it through a phone or app, or by voice inside the app.

Core ships with an Nvidia RTX Pro 4000 SFF Blackwell GPU bundled into the price, and Ghost says that means buyers do not need to source one separately. It also comes with its own software layer, browser, and filing system. Three models are preinstalled: Qwen-3.8-Next, Qwen-3.8-27B, and Gemma-4-31B. Users can also load models from Hugging Face or bring their own trained ones.

Javaid is selling this as more than a smarter desktop. He talks about over-the-air updates for new models, local processing for personal memory, and encryption so no cloud provider, not even Ghost, can meaningfully access the data. The company is also building a firewall to watch outgoing requests and block anything it sees as suspicious or unauthorized. If Ghost disappears, the device is supposed to keep working anyway.

The team builds the units in San Francisco for now, and preorders open Monday, with shipping planned for the last week of October. Javaid compares Core with a Mac Mini only to say the real difference is purpose: Core is designed from the ground up for agents, not adapted after the fact. That is the whole pitch here. Not a general computer with AI bolted on, but a sealed little box trying to become the center of your digital life.