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Ghost, a startup run by a 19-year-old CEO, just raised an $11 million dollar seed led by Andreessen Horowitz to sell Core, a $3,500 computer built to run your personal AI agents.
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Welcome to Startup Bios, I'm Brian McCullough.
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Like and subscribe to hear about the newest startups coming out of stealth and raising new rounds almost every day.
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Javaid is 19 years old, and he's kind of already he had one career.
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He told TechCrunch that for most of his life he wanted to be a quant, one of those people who use math and data to make investing decisions, and for a while he actually was one. But he got bored with it.
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Then ChatGPT came out in 2022, and Javaid told TechCrunch, quote, "I felt fundamentally excited in a way that I never had been before."
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End quote. That got him interested in personal AI, and that interest is how we got a company called Ghost.
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Ghost came out of stealth on Monday after about a year of building, and along with that it announced an $11 million dollar seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Abstract, Audacious Ventures, SV Angel and Nova are in the round as well. Javaid is the CEO, and his cofounder Nicholas Chua is also 19, and the two cofounders are in their early 20s.
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So this is a really young team, and what's a little unusual is that they're building actual hardware, which you don't see lot from founders this age. The product is called Core, and the way Ghost describes it, it's a personal computer designed specifically for AI agents, the kind of agents that go off and take actions on your behalf.
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The idea is that you pull all of your stuff into one box, like what's on your desktop, your apps, your smart home devices, and that box runs agents around the clock that act as your assistant, do tasks for you, and, they claim, actually come understand your life.
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Javaid told TechCrunch, quote, "You can run models on existing hardware, but it's a terrible experience on many levels."
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End quote. He calls Core a "brain in a box."
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There's no screen on it, and you're not plugging in a keyboard or a mouse either. You talk to it through a phone app or a web app, by text or by voice, although the voice part also runs through the app, so you're not actually talking to the box itself.
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It's meant to just sit on a shelf somewhere in your house and keep working while you go about your day. And it is a pretty serious machine.
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Ghost's site lists an Nvidia RTX Pro 4000 Blackwell GPU, the small form factor version, with 24 GB of memory, plus an AMD Ryzen 5 processor with 6 cores, 64 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD, all in a stainless steel case. Javaid told TechCrunch the GPU is bundled into the price so you're not out buying a graphics card on top of it and that price is $3,499 bucks. There's no subscription after that, according to Ghost.
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Preorders for the first batch opened Monday, and shipping is supposed to start at the very end of October, with Ghost's site saying October 31st specifically. You get a 30-day return window and a one-year warranty as well. SiliconAngle reports that first batch has already sold out, apparently in a matter of hours, and Ghost is now taking sign-ups for a second batch. We don't know how many units were in that first batch, though, so I wouldn't read too much into "sold out" just yet.
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The team is building these things themselves, by the way, at their own facility in San Francisco. On the software side, Core ships with open models already installed. TechCrunch lists three, two from Alibaba's Qwen 3.8 family plus Google's Gemma 4 31B, and Ghost's own site lists a fourth one called Muse-Glimmer-30B.
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You can also pull down other models from Hugging Face, or load models you trained yourself. Ghost built its own software layer on top, with its own browser and filing system, and the pitch is that it keeps working on tasks without you constantly prompting it.
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Updates work kind of like your car, if your car as a Tesla.
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Javaid told TechCrunch, quote, "As new models or improvements to existing models come out, we can push out over-the-air updates, similar to how Tesla works." If a whole new generation of a model comes out, Go says it'll ask you before switching you over, or you can just turn on auto-updates. A lot of people in the AI tinkerer crowd have been buying Mac Minis lately and setting them up to run AI tools at home, as I'm pretty sure you know. TechCrunch asked Javaid about exactly that.
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His answer was basically that a general-purpose computer you have to configure yourself, while Core's hardware and software were built for agents from day one, with the models already on there when you open the box. But the real pitch here is ownership.
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Ghost's first-ever post on X said that an AI agent with an intimate understanding of your life should, quote, "not live on infrastructure someone else owns." So instead of renting an assistant from OpenAI or Google every month, you buy the box once.
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The models run locally, the memory of everything the agent learns about you lives on the device, and Javaid says your personal information is encrypted so that no cloud provider or third party, and that includes a Ghost, can meaningfully get at it.
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Quote, "The user owns all of it," he told TechCrunch.
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"Once you buy the hardware, everything is stored, run, and processed on the device." End quote. They're also promising the thing keeps working even if Ghost itself goes away.
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Javaid said, quote, "All of the source code, logic, and model weights live on the device, not the services.
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We build this device to not be dependent on having an outside entity maintaining the service." End quote.
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You get to decide how much autonomy your agents have, Javaid says.
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And because an agent like this is going to be holding your logins and passwords, the team is building a firewall to limit what it can do with those credentials. The way he describes it, the firewall watches every request going out of the computer, and if the agent tries something it shouldn't, or tries to sneak data out, request.
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the request gets blocked and flagged for you to review.
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What does it actually hook into?
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Ghost's site lists your email, your calendar, your finances, your files, your browser history, your health records, and on and on.
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Plus smart home stuff like lights and speakers and cameras, even fridges, and wearables like Whoop, Oura and ate Sleep.
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Javaid gave TechCrunch an example of how it's all supposed to come together, quote, "Core proactively sends you a notification that you might be getting sick because it sees your resting heart rate as 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."
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The examples on the website are smaller than that, like telling you you're low on groceries, or to leave early for your commute because of the weather. The privacy promise does have some fine print, though.
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Ghost's homepage says, quote, "No data ever leaves your home."
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But its own support page says web search, email and those over-the-air updates need an internet connection.
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And its privacy policy says those online features can send task information out to outside services through a gateway that Ghost runs.
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Ghost says that gateway doesn't store anything, but the outside provider on the other end plays by its own rules.
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The policy also says Core, quote, "does not use a remote AI model as a fallback for its local conversational AI or memory processing."
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So, the way I read it, the thinking and the memory stay in the box, but when the agent has to go do something out on the internet, some of that task information is going to leave your house, which, I mean, it kind of has to. Javaid says he's not too worried about the competition, including the giant tech companies. He told TechCrunch, quote, "People sometimes give incumbents credit for having already built the product because they have the ingredients." He gave Apple credit for great hardware, but he thinks most of the hard part here is software, quote, "The model reasons over your life, how it remembers, how it takes action, how it knows when to reach out." main focus, he says, is building something people love.
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Quote, "If we can't do that, Apple isn't the reason we failed."
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End quote. Is $3,499 a lot?
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Compared to a twenty-dollar-a-month chatbot plan, you'd be paying that subscription for well over a decade before you broke even.
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But I don't think that's really who this is for, at least not yet.
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The first buyers are going to be the same people who've been buying Mac Minis to run agents at home, people who would otherwise be speccing out a GPU rig themselves. For that crowd, a preconfigured box with a decent Nvidia card in it and the software already set up is a pretty reasonable deal, The thing I'd keep in mind is that a model of around 30 billion parameters running at home is good, but it's still going to trail the biggest cloud models on the hard stuff, like complicated reasoning or coding, right now anyway. Ghost's whole bet is that for a personal assistant, knowing your life matters more than raw smarts.
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That might be true. But the cloud models keep getting better too, and so do their memory features. The competition is basically everybody.
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There's Apple, which already sells the Mac Mini that Ghost keeps getting compared to, and which has been leaning hard on its own privacy story with AI. There's Nvidia, which sells its own little desktop AI boxes to developers. And there's every big lab pushing cloud agents that are free or close to it. Javaid's point that having the ingredients isn't the same as having the product is fair, I think.
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But Apple could, in theory, ship a version of this, and the day they do, Ghost's job gets a lot harder. That promise about the box working even if Ghost shuts down is, I'd argue, the most underrated thing in this announcement. Remember Humane? When HP bought Humane's assets last year, the AI Pins basically stopped working, and the people who'd paid hundreds of dollars for them ended up with a paperweight.
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So putting the weights and the logic on the device, and saying so up front, is a smart way to take that fear off the table.
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There are real risks here, though.
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Building units in-house in San Francisco works for a first batch, but it's a whole different business at scale, especially with GPU prices being what they are. Then there's security.
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Put someone's bank data, health records and home cameras into one always-on box, and that box becomes a pretty attractive target.
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The firewall sounds good, but as far as I know no outside researcher has actually tested it yet. And the "no data ever leaves your home" line on the homepage versus what the privacy policy says, that's exactly the kind of gap that can turn into a bad news cycle for a privacy-first company if they're not careful. Still, Andreessen leading an $11 million dollar seed for a 19-year-old's hardware company tells you they buy the idea that personal AI eventually moves into your house the way the Wi-Fi router did.
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The real test is the end of October, when people actually plug these in and find out if it feels like having an assistant that knows them, or just an expensive box on the shelf.
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that's it for this episode. Like and subscribe if you'd like to get your startup team interviewed on this podcast for about a 45 minute episode.
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Get in touch at hi@startupbios.tech.
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