Ghost raises $11 million to build Core, a local AI agent PC

Ghost's founding team, led by 19-year-old CEO Zain Javaid, spent the last year developing Core around a single argument: an AI agent with an intimate understanding of your life should "not live on infrastructure someone else owns," as the company put it in its first post on X. That stance is a direct counterpoint to today's cloud-based agents, which run on servers controlled by large corporations and need deep access to private data. By keeping source code, logic and model weights on the device, Ghost says Core would keep working even if the company itself disappeared.

The device ships with several open-source models at launch, including Alibaba's Qwen-3.8 and Qwen-3.8-2.7B and Google's Gemma-4-31B, and users can download more from Hugging Face and other repositories. It relies on an Nvidia RTX Pro 4000 SFF Blackwell graphics processing unit, and software updates arrive over the air like Tesla's vehicle updates. With no monitor, peripherals or consumer operating system, it is reached through a dedicated smartphone and web app.

The open question is whether that privacy story converts into volume. The first batch, at $3,499 apiece, sold out in hours, and the roughly $11 million in new backing gives Ghost room to build more — but the company has not said when second-batch orders will open. Whether buyers will treat local agent hardware as a must-have, rather than a niche purchase for privacy-focused users, is likely to shape how much of the market follows this approach.