Ghost raises $11M seed led by Andreessen Horowitz for a $3,499 local-first personal AI computer

San Francisco startup Ghost, led by 19-year-old CEO Zain Javaid, raised an $11M seed led by Andreessen Horowitz with Abstract, Audacious Ventures, SV Angel and Nova. Its first product, Core, is a $3,499 desktop built around an Nvidia RTX Pro 4000 SFF Blackwell GPU that ships with open models such as Qwen 3.8 and Gemma 4 preinstalled, user-held encryption keys and an outbound firewall, so personal AI agents run entirely on-device. The first preorder batch sold out within hours and shipments start in late October. It is a bet that privacy-sensitive consumers will pay workstation prices to keep agents off the cloud.

Companies mentioned

NvidiaDeepgramQwenAmazon NovaGemma