San Francisco-based startup Ghost is pursuing this vision with Core, a $3,499 personal computer designed to understand users, manage tasks and operate across apps and services. Co-founded by 19-year-old Zain Javaid and 3 other young entrepreneurs, the startup has raised $11 million to develop its AI-focused computing platform.
Meet the team behind Ghost
Ghost’s founding team includes Zain Javaid, 19, Gautam Sharda, 23, Yifei Chen, 24, and Nicholas Chua, 19. Each founder brings expertise in AI, engineering, design or business growth.
Javaid previously worked as a quant at Millennium, using mathematics and data to support investment decisions. However, he eventually lost interest in the role. The arrival of ChatGPT in 2022 sparked his interest in artificial intelligence and inspired the idea behind Ghost.
As the company’s driving force, Javaid is focused on developing personal AI agents that understand users, interact with different apps and services, and perform tasks on their behalf. His work also covers the hardware, operating system and AI layer needed to build a computer around these agents.
Sharda previously worked as a software engineer at Google. His responsibilities included Cloud SDK build and release infrastructure, along with infrastructure supporting retrieval-augmented generation and evaluation systems for Gemini Code Assist.
Before joining Ghost, he co-founded another startup focused on AI agents for computer use. The venture raised $500,000 and piloted voice AI solutions for dental clinics.
Sharda joined Ghost after conversations with Javaid about local AI models and consumer privacy. He now works across hardware and software, focusing on generative interfaces, self-improving AI-agent architectures, post-training experiments and inference optimisation.
Yifei Chen serves as Ghost’s founding designer, leading product experience, brand development and design engineering. Previously, she worked at OKX on visual design and art direction for product launches and campaigns. She also contributed to SCAD FLUX and worked as a student media web developer at the Savannah College of Art and Design.
Chen holds a master’s degree in User Experience Design from SCAD and a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University.
The fourth co-founder, Nicholas Chua, leads growth initiatives for Ghost’s personal AI computer. He studied Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at the University of California, Berkeley. His previous experience includes growth at Wispr Flow and work on governance agents at TikTok.
Core puts AI agents at the centre of computing
Ghost’s first product, Core, is a $3,499 personal computer built specifically to run AI agents. Unlike conventional desktops, it has no screen and is designed to operate continuously in the background.
The device combines dedicated hardware with its own software layer, browser, file system and pre-installed AI models. Users can control it through a phone or app while the computer handles AI processing.
According to Ghost, Core can run its models, personal memory and user data locally, reducing its dependence on cloud services. The company aims to shift computing from manually opening applications to AI systems that understand context and complete tasks for users.
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