Ghost Raises $11M Seed for a $3,499 Home Computer Built to Run Your Agents
The Mac Mini became the default personal-agent box by accident. Ghost wants to be that box on purpose. The San Francisco startup came out of stealth on Monday with an $11 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Abstract, Audacious Ventures, SV Angel and Nova participating. No valuation was disclosed. Founder and CEO Zain Javaid is 19.
The product is called Core. It is a screenless computer you reach through a phone app, built around an Nvidia RTX Pro 4000 SFF Blackwell GPU, and it costs $3,499. Three models come preinstalled (Qwen-3.8-Next, Qwen-3.8-27B and Gemma-4-31B), and you can pull others from Hugging Face or load your own. Preorders opened Monday and the first batch is scheduled to ship in the last week of October. The team assembles the units itself in San Francisco.
The idea is one always-on machine that holds your files, apps and smart-home data and keeps agents running against them without being prompted. Javaid's example: Core notices an elevated resting heart rate, sees you were up late working, knows it is flu season, and tells you that you may be getting sick. Models and memory run locally, data is encrypted so that Ghost can't read it, and model updates arrive over the air.
Two design choices stand out. A firewall watches every outgoing network request and blocks the agent if it uses credentials for something unsanctioned or tries to move data out, then flags it for review. And the device is meant to keep working if Ghost shuts down, since the code, logic and weights all live on the box.
The pitch against Apple is that the hard part is software: how the model reasons over your life, remembers, acts and decides when to speak up. That is true, and it is also the part nobody has nailed on any hardware. Still, the bet is well timed. Open models that fit on a single workstation GPU got good enough this year for a "brain in a box" to be a product, where last year it would have been a hobby project.
Link: techcrunch.com/2026/10/05/at-19-ghost-founder-raises-11-million-to-build-a-3499-computer-for-your-personal-ai/
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The product is called Core. It is a screenless computer you reach through a phone app, built around an Nvidia RTX Pro 4000 SFF Blackwell GPU, and it costs $3,499. Three models come preinstalled (Qwen-3.8-Next, Qwen-3.8-27B and Gemma-4-31B), and you can pull others from Hugging Face or load your own. Preorders opened Monday and the first batch is scheduled to ship in the last week of October. The team assembles the units itself in San Francisco.
The idea is one always-on machine that holds your files, apps and smart-home data and keeps agents running against them without being prompted. Javaid's example: Core notices an elevated resting heart rate, sees you were up late working, knows it is flu season, and tells you that you may be getting sick. Models and memory run locally, data is encrypted so that Ghost can't read it, and model updates arrive over the air.
Two design choices stand out. A firewall watches every outgoing network request and blocks the agent if it uses credentials for something unsanctioned or tries to move data out, then flags it for review. And the device is meant to keep working if Ghost shuts down, since the code, logic and weights all live on the box.
The pitch against Apple is that the hard part is software: how the model reasons over your life, remembers, acts and decides when to speak up. That is true, and it is also the part nobody has nailed on any hardware. Still, the bet is well timed. Open models that fit on a single workstation GPU got good enough this year for a "brain in a box" to be a product, where last year it would have been a hobby project.
Link: techcrunch.com/2026/10/05/at-19-ghost-founder-raises-11-million-to-build-a-3499-computer-for-your-personal-ai/
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