Meet 19-year-old Zain Javaid and his Gen-Z team building the Mac Mini of AI agents

Silicon Valley is currently buzzing with new startups and ideas around AI agents and personal computing. New to join the party is AI startup Ghost, which is betting that the next big personal computer will not look much like the PCs we use today. Instead, the company wants to build a computer where AI agents are at the centre, constantly working in the background and helping users get things done. Co-founded by 19-year-old Zain Javaid and three other young founders, Ghost has already raised $11 million to turn that idea into a real product.Based in San Francisco, Ghost is focused on building personal AI that can do more than simply answer questions. The company is developing AI agents that can understand a user's context, work across different apps and services, and carry out tasks on their behalf. The company has already developed its first product, Core, but before we get into that, let’s take a closer look at the team behind it. Introducing Core, The Personal Al Computer The most powerful technology humanity has built should belong to you Order today: https://t.co/tlNxSu5B5C https://t.co/C8Rqv4eHLl— Zain Javaid (@zainmfj) October 5, 2026Ghost has a remarkably young founding team. Javaid, 19, is joined by Gautam Sharda, 23, Yifei Chen, 24, and Nicholas Chua, 19, with each bringing a different set of skills and experience to the startup.Zain Javaid, 19: Founder and CEOJavaid's journey into AI did not begin with a traditional startup background. He has previously worked as a quant at Millennium, where he used maths and data to help guide investment decisions. However, in an interview with TechCrunch, Javaid revealed that he eventually grew bored with the work. Then ChatGPT arrived in 2022, and he became interested in AI and its possibilities. That interest eventually led him to the idea behind Ghost. At Ghost, Javaid is driving the company's overall vision. He is working on building personal AI agents that can understand users more deeply, work across different apps and services, and eventually take on tasks on their behalf. His work also involves rethinking the computer itself around these AI agents, from the hardware and operating system to the AI layer running on top of it.Gautam Sharda, 23: Co-founder and technical leadAnother co-founder, Gautam Sharda, brings a strong technical background to Ghost's young founding team. Before joining the startup, he worked as a software engineer at Google, where he worked on Cloud SDK build and release infrastructure, as well as infrastructure related to Gemini Code Assist's retrieval-augmented generation and evaluation systems. Before Ghost, Sharda was also a co-founder of another startup, where he worked on AI agents for computer use, raised $500,000 and piloted voice AI for dental clinics. Interestingly, Sharda's connection with Ghost started when he first met Javaid. In a post on X, Sharda revealed that the two spoke about local AI models and privacy for consumers, and those conversations eventually led him to join Ghost. Since then, he has been working across both hardware and software to build the company's consumer AI computer, including generative interfaces, self-improving AI-agent architectures, post-training experiments and optimising the inference stack.Yifei Chen, 24: Co-founder and Design lead Joining the two co-founders is Yifei Chen, who brings the design side to the team. She is Ghost's founding designer and is responsible for building the product experience, brand system and design-engineering foundation from the ground up.Before joining Ghost, Chen worked as a designer at OKX, where she designed and art-directed visuals for major product releases and campaigns. She also worked on visual design at SCAD FLUX and 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.Nicholas Chua, 19: Co-founder and looking at growthThe fourth co-founder is Nicholas Chua. At Ghost, he is focused on growth, particularly around the company's personal AI computer.Chua studied Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining Ghost, he worked in growth at Wispr Flow and also spent time at TikTok, where he worked on governance agents. That mix of growth, product and AI experience now comes into play as Ghost works towards bringing its personal AI computer to consumers.Together, the four founders are betting on a future where computers are less about opening apps and more about having AI that can work for you in the background. Meet Core, Ghost's personal AI computerSo, what exactly are they building? The company's first product is Core, a $3,499 personal computer designed specifically to run AI agents. Unlike a conventional desktop, Core does not have a screen. Instead, it is designed to continuously run AI agents that can understand a user's data, perform tasks and act on their behalf.According to the company, Core is also designed to be more than just an AI model running on an existing computer. It comes with dedicated hardware, its own software layer, browser and file system, along with AI models that are already installed. Users can control Core through a phone or app, while the computer handles the AI processing. Ghost says the models, personal memory and data can also run locally, rather than depending entirely on cloud services.- Ends