Host Brian McCullough discusses startup Ghost.

Ghost, a startup run by a 19 year old CEO, just raised an $11 million seed led by Andreessen Horowitz to sell Core, a $3,500 computer built to run your personal AI agents. Welcome to Startup bios. I'm Brian McCullough. Like and subscribe to hear about the newest startups coming out of stealth and raising new rounds almost every day. Zane Javed is 19 years old and he's kind of already had one career. 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. Then ChatGPT came out in 2022 and Javed told TechCrunch, quote, I felt fundamentally excited in a way that I never had been before, end quote. That got him interested in personal AI, and that interest is how we got a company called Ghost. Ghost came out Stealth on Monday after about a year of building, and along with that, it announced an $11 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Abstract, Audacious Ventures, SV Angels and Nova are in the round as well. Javaid is the CEO and his co founder Nicholas Chua is also 19 and the two other co founders are in their early 20s. 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 a lot from founders this age. The product is called Core, and the way GH 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. 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 to understand your life. Javaid told TechCrunch, quote, You can run models on existing hardware, but it's a terrible experience on many levels, end quote. He calls Core a brain in a box. 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. It's meant to just sit on a shelf somewhere in your house and keep working while you go about your day. And it's a pretty serious machine. Ghost, Sightless and Nvidia RTX Pro.