Zain Javaid is the Founder and CEO of Ghost, a San Francisco-based AI hardware startup building dedicated personal intelligence computers that run AI agents locally and privately.

A prodigy who started coding at age 9, traded at a hedge fund by 14, and founded his first company at 15, Zain went on to work as a quantitative trader at Millennium before pivoting to AI after the 2022 launch of ChatGPT.

Zain believes that the most powerful AI technology should be owned by users, not rented from cloud providers, championing a future where personal intelligence runs entirely on hardware you control.

He assembled a Gen-Z founding team including Nicholas Chua, Yifei Chen, and Gautam Sharda, and secured a Z Fellows fellowship, before raising an $11M seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz alongside Abstract, Audacious Ventures, SV Angel, and Nova.

Ghost emerged from stealth in October 2026 with its debut product Core, a $3,499 screenless AI computer powered by an Nvidia RTX Pro 4000 SFF Blackwell GPU, redefining personal computing for the AI agent era.