Ghost, a San Francisco startup founded by 19-year-old Zain Javaid, has raised an $11 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz to build Core — a $3,499 screenless personal computer designed to continuously run AI agents, with first shipments scheduled for the last week of October.

The company emerged from stealth on Monday after roughly a year of building. Javaid's founding team includes Nicholas Chua, 19, Yifei Chen, 24, and Guatam Sharda, 23. Abstract, Audacious Ventures, SV Angel and Nova also participated in the round.

Pre-orders for Core opened the same day the company announced its funding.

What is Core, exactly?

Javaid describes Core as a "brain box" without a screen, accessible through a phone or app. Voice mode exists, but users speak through the Core app rather than to the box itself. The device centralizes a person's data — desktop files, apps, smart home devices — into one piece of hardware built to run AI agents that perform tasks and understand a user's life without constant prompting.

"You can run models on existing hardware, but it's a terrible experience on many levels," Javaid, the CEO, said.

Core ships with its own GPU, so customers don't have to buy one separately, plus a proprietary software layer, browser and filing system. It runs three preinstalled models — Qwen-3.8-Next, Qwen-3.8-27B and Gemma-4-31B — though users can install other models from Hugging Face or load their own weights.

Asked whether Core is simply a Mac Mini with AI branding, Javaid argued the difference is architectural: Core's hardware and software were purpose-built around agent workloads, with models installed out of the box, whereas Apple's Mac Mini is general-purpose and must be configured for AI use.

"As new models or improvements to existing models come out, we can push out over-the-air updates, similar to how Tesla works," Javaid said. When a new model generation arrives, Core asks the user whether to switch; auto-updates can keep the device on the latest generation automatically.

How does Ghost handle privacy and autonomy?

All source code, logic, model weights and personal memory run locally on the device. Personal information is encrypted so that neither cloud providers nor third parties — including Ghost itself — can access the memory in any meaningful way, according to the company. Users control how much autonomy their Core agents receive, and the device is programmed to keep functioning if Ghost shuts down.

"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."

The team is also building a firewall around agent credentials. The firewall "monitors every outgoing network request on the computer and if it sees the agent performing a sanctioned action or exfiltrating data it shouldn't, it rejects the request and flags it for user review," Javaid said.

"The user owns all of it," he said of the device, memory and data. "Once you buy the hardware, everything is stored, run, and processed on the device."

Can a four-person team compete with Apple?

The four-person team currently manufactures the units at its San Francisco facility — an unusually hands-on approach for a consumer hardware launch with national pre-orders.

Javaid positions Core at the intersection of two of the industry's hottest categories: physical AI and consumer AI. On the hardware side, the Mac Mini can serve as a personal AI assistant; on the software side, OpenAI's Dot, Meta's Muse and startup Instinct — which announced a $1 billion Series C at a $10 billion valuation just two months after launch — are racing to own personal intelligence. Javaid's thesis is that "every person on earth would eventually have a single agent that would know everything about and be able to do anything for them," an extension of the user where "the more it understands our habits, values, and goals, the more useful it will be in our daily lives."

He isn't losing sleep over incumbents. "People sometimes give incumbents credit for having already built the product because they have the ingredients," he said. He credits Apple with strong hardware, but argues Core's real work is in software: "the model reasons over your life, how it remembers, how it takes action, how it knows when to reach out."

He offered a concrete example: Core can proactively notify a user they may be getting sick by combining an elevated resting heart rate with computer history showing late nights on a project, plus seasonal context that it is flu season in San Francisco.

The company's stated priority is simply building a product people love. "If we can't do that, Apple isn't the reason we failed," Javaid said. Whether a $3,499 screenless agent box can find a mainstream audience will get its first real test when the initial batch ships in late October.