Hark

Hark is an AI lab and hardware startup founded by serial entrepreneur Brett Adcock in late 2025 with $100 million of his own capital. Rather than building a single layer of the AI stack, Hark is developing foundation models, software systems, native hardware and new interfaces together, aiming to create a persistent, personal AI system that can listen, see and interact with the world in real time and act as a universal interface to a person's digital life. The company emerged from stealth in March 2026, revealing that former Apple industrial designer Abidur Chowdhury (credited with design work on the iPhone Air) had joined as Director of Design, alongside a roughly 45-person team of AI researchers and hardware and product designers drawn in part from Meta AI, Apple and Tesla. Two months later, in May 2026, Hark closed a $700 million Series A led by Parkway Venture Capital, with participation from Nvidia, AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Brookfield, ARK Invest, Greycroft, Align Ventures, Prime Movers Lab and Tamarack Global, valuing the company at $6 billion post-money before it had shipped a product. By the time of that raise the company had grown to about 70 employees and was operating a data center equipped with Nvidia B200 GPUs. Hark plans to release its first multimodal AI models in summer 2026, powering a personal AI platform designed to work with existing products and services, to be followed by custom hardware devices built specifically for that system. In August 2026, AT&T announced a partnership with Hark that includes an AT&T investment in the company alongside collaboration on device certification and advanced network connectivity for Hark's forthcoming AI-native consumer devices; the investment amount was not disclosed. Adcock previously founded Vettery (sold to Adecco), Archer Aviation (went public via SPAC in 2021) and Figure AI (humanoid robotics, where he remains CEO), and the venture-backed history behind those companies is part of why Hark was able to raise at this scale before shipping anything. Hark operates from a shared campus in San Jose, California that also hosts Figure AI.