Ghost Raises $11 Million From a16z to Sell a $3,499 Box for Running AI Agents

Ghost, a San Francisco startup run by 19-year-old chief executive Zain Javaid, came out of stealth on Oct. 5 with an $11 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz and a $3,499 computer called Core, TechCrunch reported. The round is announced, not described as closed in any filing, and the valuation was not disclosed.

Other investors are Abstract, Audacious Ventures, SV Angel and Nova. Dividing the round by the unit price, $11 million equals about 3,100 Cores at list price, which is a way of seeing how much of the plan rests on hardware revenue rather than on the capital.

What $3,499 buys

Core is a screenless desktop that Javaid calls a "brain in a box," according to TechCrunch. Users reach it through a phone or an app. Ghost's own Core page lists the hardware:

Component	Spec on Ghost's page
GPU	Nvidia RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell SFF Edition, 24GB GDDR7 ECC, 432GB/s
CPU	AMD Ryzen 5 7600, 6 cores, 12 threads
Memory	64GB DDR5
Storage	1TB NVMe SSD

The page also lists 30-day returns and no subscription. It names four preinstalled models: Qwen 3.8-Next, Qwen 3.8-27B, Gemma 4-31B and Muse-Glimmer-30B. TechCrunch's account names the first three only.

The model list matters because of the memory. A 27 billion parameter model stored at 16 bits needs about 54GB for its weights alone, more than twice the GPU's 24GB, so the box can run it only in a compressed form or by spilling into the 64GB of system memory. Ghost has not said which versions it ships. The Qwen3.8-27B release is Apache 2.0 and has 482 finetunes, so the weights themselves are not a constraint on the company.

What is claimed about privacy

Ghost's page says Core runs "entirely on device" and that "No data ever leaves your home." TechCrunch reports the same design: models and memory run locally, personal data is encrypted so that no third party including Ghost can meaningfully read it, and source code and model weights live on the device so that Core keeps working if Ghost shuts down.

The security work is unfinished. TechCrunch describes a firewall for agent credentials as in progress. It would watch outgoing network requests and flag suspicious ones for the owner to review. An agent that can use a person's logins is the part of the design where the privacy promise is tested, and no independent review of Core exists yet.

Shipping and the Mac mini comparison

TechCrunch says the first batch opened on Monday, Oct. 5, with shipping scheduled for the last week of October, and that units are built at Ghost's San Francisco facility. The product page says only that the first batch is open and carries no ship date or deposit terms, so the delivery window rests on one report.

Javaid compared Core to a Mac mini, a general-purpose machine that can be configured for AI. His argument, per TechCrunch, is that Core's hardware and software are built specifically for agents, and that most of the competitive difficulty is software. He credited Apple with good hardware.

The founding team also includes Nicholas Chua, 19, Yifei Chen, 24, and Gautam Sharda, 23. Another a16z-backed company, EliseAI, raised $350 million at a $4 billion valuation in September; Ghost's seed is about 3 percent of that round.

The next checkable event is delivery. If units reach customers in the last week of October, the first owners will be able to test whether a 24GB card holds up under the model list on the page.