a16z leads $11M round for Ghost, whose screenless Core AI computer costs $3,499
Ghost, founded by 19-year-old CEO Zain Javaid, came out of stealth with an $11 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with Abstract, Audacious Ventures, SV Angel and Nova participating, and launched its first product: Core, a screenless, keyboard-less personal AI computer priced at $3,499 that its website says has already sold out, with shipping expected in the last week of October. Core packs an NVIDIA RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell SFF Edition GPU with 24GB GDDR7, 64GB DDR5 memory, a 1TB NVMe SSD and an AMD Ryzen 5 7600, and ships preinstalled with models including Qwen 3.8-Next, Qwen 3.8-27B and Gemma 4-31B, with users free to install others. Ghost says models, memories and personal data run and are stored encrypted mainly on-device with no usage-based AI subscription, and that it is building an "agent firewall" that monitors network requests and blocks unauthorized actions, plus OTA-style model updates.
It is the latest attempt to build hardware specifically for persistent personal agents, though the promised always-on memory and proactive behavior still need real-world validation.
越来越多玩家下场，AI 时代的PC竞争就此全面展开。
Agent被认为正在改变未来人类的生产和协作方式，但承载这种变化的硬件，至今还没有一个真正称得上“产品”的答案。如果说移动互联网时代等来了iPhone，那么Agent的普及，或许也在等待一台属于自己的“iPhone”。甚至早在几十年前，乔布斯就曾设想过，电脑的未来不应该只是一个工具，而应该成为用户的“Agent”。
当年19岁的乔布斯还没有找到答案。他那时刚从大学退学不久，一次偶然的机会，他在报纸上看到Atari招聘电子机械工程师的广告，于是主动上门求职，有了自己人生中唯一一次正式的工作面试。直到两年后，他才与沃兹签下合作协议，苹果由此诞生。
然而，半个世纪后，另一个19岁的年轻人Zain Javaid，似乎就要实现乔布斯的设想。颇为巧合的是，10月5日，就在乔布斯逝世15周年这一天，Zain Javaid作为CEO所创办的公司Ghost结束隐身模式，公布1100万美元种子轮融资。资方不乏硅谷明星机构，由Andreessen Horowitz（a16z）领投，Abstract、Audacious Ventures、SV Angel、Nova参投，估值未披露。
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