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

Artificial intelligence hardware startup Ghost AI said today it has raised $11 million in funding to build what it believes is the first personal computer that’s dedicated to running personal AI agents.

The round was led by Silicon Valley heavy-hitter Andreessen Horowitz and saw participation from Abstract, Audacious Ventures, Nova and SV Angel.

Ghost AI was founded by a team of young entrepreneurs led by 19-year-old Chief Executive Zain Javaid (pictured), which has spent the last year developing a high-powered computer called Core that doesn’t need a monitor or any peripheral devices. Instead, it should be thought of as a “brain in a box” that’s designed to do nothing more than continuously run AI agents that act on behalf of its user.

Ghost’s founding team believes that existing AI agents, which run in cloud-based servers controlled by big corporations, is fundamentally flawed. AI agents need to access vast amounts of their user’s data, including some very personal and private information, which requires a lot of trust. But as Ghost explains in its first-ever post on X, an AI agent that has an intimate understanding of your life should “not live on infrastructure someone else owns.”

To that end, Javaid told TechCrunch in an interview, he and his co-founders decided there must be a market for a powerful, dedicated and locally-hosted machine that users can install at home to power the AI agents that are going to start running their digital lives. This way, their AI agents will be able to continuously learn about them, reason on their private data and perform tasks without ever sending so much as a byte of information to the cloud.

Core is a powerful machine. It comes packed with an Nvidia RTX Pro 4000 SFF Blackwell graphics processing unit that ensures those personal agents have plenty of computing power available. It has its own software layer, its own file system and web browser.

It also ships with several 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. Users also have the option to download additional models from Hugging Face and other model repositories.

“All of the source code, logic, and model weights live on the device, not the services,” Javaid said. “We build this device to not be dependent on having an outside entity maintaining the service.”

Because Core doesn’t have a screen or a consumer-friendly operating system like Windows or Ubuntu, it’s instead accessed by a dedicated smartphone and web application. This app serves as the control center, from where users can message their personal agents or speak to them other voice in order to provide them with instructions, assign them tasks and ask questions. The device can be set to update automatically, with Ghost delivering these over-the-air when it’s connected to the web, similar to how Tesla Inc. updates the software on its electric vehicles.

Core’s main selling points are security and privacy. Because all of the models are run locally and the user’s data is stored within it, Ghost made sure that it’s fully encrypted.

The user holds the encryption keys, and so no third-party, including Ghost, can access what’s stored on the machine. The device also integrates a firewall that’s tasked with monitoring all of the user’s agent’s outgoing requests to ensure that no data is being sneakily exfiltrated and no malicious actions are being taken.

The device has also been built with longevity in mind, Javaid explained. Because all of the source code, logic and model weights run on the computer itself, it would continue functioning perfectly even if Ghost itself disappears. That reassurance might be necessary, since Core isn’t cheap – the first batch of devices, which has already sold out, cost $3,499 apiece.

Ghost is now inviting users to register for interest in its second batch. It hasn’t said when it expects to start taking more orders, but given that batch one sold out in a matter of hours and it now has several million dollars sitting in the bank to start building more, that’s surely going to be its top priority going forward.

Photo: Ghost