At 19, founder raises $11 million for Ghost, maker of a $3,499 computer for personal AI

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Disrupt doors open Oct. 13. Get your pass and bring someone with you at 50% off. REGISTER NOW. For much of his life, Zain Javaid, 19, wanted to be a quant who uses math and data to guide his investment decisions. And for a while, he was one. But he got bored. Then, in 2022, ChatGPT was released, and “I felt fundamentally excited in a way that I never had been before,” he told TechCrunch. He became interested in personal AI, and that interest led him to start Ghost, which announced Monday that it has emerged from stealth after a year of building, along with an $11 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Other investors in the round include Abstract, Audacious Ventures, SV Angel, and Nova. His founding team includes Nicholas Chua, 19, Yifei Chen, 24, and Guatam Sharda, 23.  Ghost’s first product is Core, a personal computer designed specifically for AI agents that can take actions on a person’s behalf. According to Javaid, the idea is to centralize a person’s data, from what’s on their desktop to apps to smart home devices, into one piece of hardware designed to continuously run AI agents that can act as an assistant, perform tasks, and understand a person’s life. “You can run models on existing hardware, but it’s a terrible experience on many levels,” said Javaid, who is also Core’s CEO. Core includes an Nvidia RTX Pro 4000 SFF Blackwell GPU (a type of chip commonly used to run AI models), said Javaid, adding that the GPU is bundled into the device’s price, so customers don’t need to buy one separately. He said it also has its own software layer, browser, and filing system, and can continuously process information and tasks without constant prompting.