Ghost Raises $11M Seed for $3,499 Core Personal AI Computer

Javaid, who is also Core’s CEO, told TechCrunch he had long wanted to be a quant, using math and data to guide investment decisions, and worked as one for a time before becoming bored. After ChatGPT was released in 2022, he said he felt “fundamentally excited in a way that I never had been before,” and his interest in personal AI led him to start Ghost. The founding team includes Nicholas Chua, 19, Yifei Chen, 24, and Guatam Sharda, 23. Other investors in the seed round include Abstract, Audacious Ventures, SV Angel, and Nova.

Core is meant to centralize a person’s data—from desktop content to apps to smart home devices—into one piece of hardware that continuously runs AI agents capable of acting as an assistant, performing tasks, and understanding a person’s life, Javaid said. “You can run models on existing hardware, but it’s a terrible experience on many levels,” he said.

The device includes an Nvidia RTX Pro 4000 SFF Blackwell GPU, a type of chip commonly used to run AI models, Javaid said, adding that the GPU is bundled into the device’s price so customers do not need to buy one separately. Core also has its own software layer, browser, and filing system, and can continuously process information and tasks without constant prompting, he said.

Javaid described Core as a “brain box” without a screen that users access through a phone or app. Voice mode is available, but users must speak into the Core app rather than the box itself. Core comes with three models preinstalled: Qwen-3.8-Next, Qwen-3.8-27B, and Gemma-4-31B. Users can also install other models from Hugging Face or load their own trained models, he said.

Asked how Core differs from a Mac Mini, Apple’s small desktop computer that some people set up to run AI tools, Javaid said Core’s hardware and software were built specifically for running AI agents, with models already installed, while the Mac Mini is a general-purpose computer that can be configured for AI. He said Ghost can push over-the-air updates as new models or improvements arrive, similar to how Tesla works, and can ask users whether they want to switch. Users can also turn on auto-updates so they are always running the latest generation of a given model, he said.

The team currently builds the units at its San Francisco facility. Javaid said the goal is to sell a fully functioning computer that does not require complex setup or configuration. Models and personal memory run locally, he said, and all personal information is encrypted so that no cloud provider or third party, including Ghost, can meaningfully access it. Users can control how much autonomy they give their Core agents, and the device is programmed to keep working if Ghost shuts down. “All of the source code, logic, and model weights live on the device, not the services,” he said. “We build this device to not be dependent on having an outside entity maintaining the service.”

He said the team is also building a firewall to limit how the agent can use its credentials, such as logins and passwords. 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.”

Javaid said he is not too worried about competition, including from established tech companies. “People sometimes give incumbents credit for having already built the product because they have the ingredients,” he said. He credited Apple with good hardware and disruption, but said much of what Core is aiming to tackle is software: “the model reasons over your life, how it remembers, how it takes action, how it knows when to reach out,” he said.

He offered an example of how Core is meant to work: “Core proactively sends you a notification that you might be getting sick because it sees your resting heart rate is elevated, sees from computer history that you were up late working on a project, and has seasonal context that it is flu season in San Francisco.” The company’s main focus is building a product people love, he said. “If we can’t do that, Apple isn’t the reason we failed,” he said.