Ghost Raises $11M to Launch $3,499 Personal AI Hardware

The funding round, led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Abstract, Audacious Ventures, SV Angel, and Nova, marks Ghost’s emergence from a year of stealth development. Javaid, a former quant, leads a founding team including Nicholas Chua, Yifei Chen, and Gautam Sharda. The Core unit functions as a screenless "brain in a box" that interfaces with a user's phone or desktop apps to perform tasks, manage smart home devices, and monitor personal health metrics through continuous local processing.

Technically, the device features an Nvidia RTX Pro 4000 SFF Blackwell GPU and comes pre-installed with models such as Qwen-3.8-Next and Gemma-4-31B, though users may load their own weights. Javaid emphasizes privacy, noting that all data remains encrypted on the device and operates independently of third-party cloud providers. To mitigate security risks, the team has integrated a firewall that monitors outgoing network requests, blocking unauthorized actions or data exfiltration. Pre-orders for the first batch begin this week, with shipping expected by late October from the company’s San Francisco facility.