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Ghost emerges from stealth with $11M seed round for a personal AI computer
The a16z-led startup wants your AI assistant living on a box under your desk, not on someone else's servers
Ghost, a San Francisco startup, came out of stealth on Monday with an $11 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Its pitch is simple: your personal AI should live on hardware you own, run on your desk, and answer to nobody but you.
A $3,499 box built to keep your AI at home
The company’s flagship product is called Core. It is a dedicated personal AI computer, priced at $3,499.
Shipments are expected to begin on October 31, 2026.
Core runs on an NVIDIA RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell GPU with 24 GB of GDDR7 memory, paired with 64 GB of DDR5 RAM.
Storage comes from a 1 TB NVMe SSD. The processor is a 6-core AMD Ryzen 5 7600.
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Ghost rates the machine at 770 AI TOPS.
According to the company, Core can run inference locally on models including Qwen 3.8-27B and Gemma 4-31B.
Personal context, minus the middleman
The device is meant to connect with a range of apps and smart devices. From there, it reasons and takes actions continuously, all without leaning on cloud infrastructure.
Ghost stresses that users get complete ownership over both the AI models and the context those models use. The company also positions Core as working without subscriptions.
Founder and CEO Zain Javaid is a former quant trader.
Who wrote the checks
Andreessen Horowitz led the round.
Other institutional backers include Abstract Ventures, Audacious Ventures, SV Angel, and Nova. The list of individual investors features Cory Levy, Max Mullen, Vincent Weisser, Zach Sims, and Maria Davidson.