Zain Javaid is 19 and has already tried his hand as a quant - a trader who makes decisions with maths and data. He got bored. Then, in 2022, ChatGPT came out. "I was more excited than I'd ever been," he says. That excitement gave birth to Ghost, a startup that, after a year working in stealth, has come out into the open with 11 million dollars (about 9.5 million euros) in seed funding. The round is led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Abstract, Audacious Ventures, SV Angel and Nova also taking part. The founding team is as young as the idea: Nicholas Chua (19), Yifei Chen (24) and Gautam Sharda (23).

The first product is called Core - a personal computer built solely for AI agents, programs that act on your behalf. The idea is to gather all your data, from your desktop to your apps and smart home devices, into a single box that works as an always-on assistant. Inside is an Nvidia RTX Pro 4000 SFF Blackwell graphics card, included in the 3,499-dollar price (about 3,000 euros). There's no screen - Javaid calls it "a brain in a box", reached through a phone or an app. It ships with three pre-installed models: Qwen-3.8-Next, Qwen-3.8-27B and Gemma-4-31B, and others can be added from Hugging Face. Orders are open, delivery is planned for the last week of October, and the devices are assembled in San Francisco.

The big promise is privacy. The models and personal memory run locally, everything is encrypted, and according to the founder neither a cloud provider nor Ghost itself can meaningfully access the data. "The user owns all of it. Once you buy the hardware, everything is stored, run and processed on the device," Javaid says. The device is programmed to keep working even if the company shuts down. New models will arrive via over-the-air updates, "a bit like Tesla".

His example of how Core is meant to work says more than any brochure: the box sends you a notification on its own that you might be coming down with something, because it noticed your resting heart rate is up, saw from your computer history that you worked late, and knows it's flu season in San Francisco. To some that's care. To others - a device that knows more about you than your GP, and you're the one paying for the box. Is encryption enough comfort when every trace of your life sits in one place?

The competition doesn't scare him, Javaid says, not even when the Mac Mini comes up, which many people are already adapting for AI tools. Apple, he admits, has good hardware, but the weight is in the software: how the model thinks about your life, how it remembers and when it reacts. "If we don't succeed at that, Apple won't be the reason," he says. An honest line from a 19-year-old with 11 million dollars of other people's money - it remains to be seen whether the box earns it.