Hark raises $700M Series A for AI hardware as Brett Adcock bets big on consumer AI devices

Hark raises $700M Series A for its secretive "universal" AI interface | TechCrunch

What will it take to launch the first must-have AI consumer product? Maybe $700 million. At least according to Hark, an AI lab building models and hardware for an AI personal assistant, which said on Thursday that it had raised that much in a Series A round that values it at $6 billion post-money. The mega round was led by Parkway Venture Capital, and included Align Ventures, AMD Ventures, ARK Invest, Brookfield, Greycroft, Intel Capital, Prime Movers Lab, Qualcomm Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and Tamarack Global. (Phew!) Perhaps what's most notable about the fundraise is how little Hark has revealed about what it is building. Founder and CEO, Brett Adcock, also the entrepreneur behind robotics company Figure.AI and electric aircraft builder Archer, launched Hark in late 2025 with $100 million of his own money to develop an agentic AI system that serves as a universal interface with the digital world. Hark expects to release its first multi-modal models this summer, which it says will power a personal AI platform that works with existing products and services. The company expects to follow that with hardware devices built specifically for those systems. The fresh cash will be spent on recruiting top talent for hardware, product design and AI research, and on securing compute and components. The company currently has 70 employees, and runs a data center with Nvidia B200 GPUs. Abidur Chowdhury (pictured above in a promo video), a former Apple product executive, is Hark's director of design. He declined to reveal new details of what he's working on when TechCrunch peppered him with questions this week, but said investors were impressed by a series of demos from his team. "I haven't seen anything that feels like something that will really help like the normal person," Chowdhury said, speaking of the AI products on the market. "People are really building things to help people make software, and it's working, and it's really impactful, but we haven't really seen that for the normal person yet." He noted that while Anthropic is prioritizing coding tools and OpenAI is moving in the same direction ahead of its IPO, few companies are focused solely on building interfaces and native hardware the way Hark is. "With this focus, with this great team that we have, and this round that we've raised, I think we can make something really special in this space," Chowdhury said. Still, there are more questions than answers. One challenge will be providing the context of a customer's life to an AI assistant without making the people around the user uncomfortable or violating their privacy. Wearables like Meta's existing glasses or the forthcoming Android spectacles don't seem to have solved this problem. When asked how he might square this particular circle, Chowdhury only smiled.

Brett Adcock's AI hardware startup Hark raises $700m at $6bn valuation

Two months out of stealth, the founder of Figure and Archer has a chip-and-model stack and a chip-and-model-stack-sized cheque to match. Hark, the AI hardware company that Brett Adcock began funding out of his own pocket late last year, has raised more than $700m in a Series A that values it at $6bn, according to Bloomberg. The round closed roughly two months after Hark emerged from stealth, and lands the company in the upper tier of AI-hardware bets before it has shipped a product. Parkway Venture Capital led the round. The investor list reads like a Who's Who of the chip and cloud stack: Nvidia, AMD Ventures, Intel Capital and Qualcomm Ventures all wrote cheques, as did Salesforce Ventures, Brookfield, ARK Invest, Greycroft, Prime Movers Lab, Align Ventures and Tamarack Global. Several of those names sit on more than one side of the AI hardware question, which is part of the point. Adcock founded Hark in late 2025 with $100m of his own money, after a run of founding companies that are now public, acquired, or among the better-funded private operators in their respective categories. He co-founded the recruiting marketplace Vettery, sold to Adecco for $100m; founded electric aircraft maker Archer Aviation, which went public via SPAC in 2021; founded humanoid robotics company Figure, where he remains chief executive; and founded school-security company Cover. He is also the principal at Hark. What Hark is actually building is less crisp than what it has raised. The company has described itself as developing a "personal AI platform" that pairs in-house foundation models, software, and native hardware with new interfaces, rather than picking a single layer of the stack. According to the BusinessWire announcement in March, Hark intends to release its first multi-modal models this summer. The category Hark is entering is small, expensive, and littered with failures. Humane's AI Pin became the most public cautionary tale of 2024, with the Rabbit R1 close behind. Even Apple, which has a hardware distribution machine no one else can match, has spent the past year trying to figure out what its on-device AI offering should actually look like. The case for Adcock is that he has shipped hardware before, at Archer and Figure, and that integrating models and silicon from day one is the version of the bet most likely to produce a defensible product. What Hark has not yet disclosed: headcount, hardware form factor, target price, launch market, or a customer pipeline. The Series A buys time to keep that opaque for a while longer. With Nvidia and AMD both on the cap table, supply allocation, often the binding constraint on AI hardware companies in 2026, becomes a question Hark can probably answer more comfortably than most of its peers. What the round does not buy is product-market fit. Hark joins a category in which several well-funded, well-credentialled teams have launched, missed, and quietly retrenched. By the company's own timeline, the first models are weeks away; the device that turns those models into a business is still further out.

Hark raises $700M+ to build 'personalized intelligence' devices - SiliconANGLE

Hark Inc., a startup developing artificial intelligence devices for the consumer market, today announced that it has raised more than $700 million in funding. Parkway Venture Capital led the Series A round. It was joined by Nvidia Corp., Intel Capital, AMD Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and several others. The company is now worth $6 billion. Hark previously raised $100 million from founder and Chief Executive Officer Brett Adcock. The entrepreneur is also the CEO of Figure AI Inc., a startup that develops humanoid robots capable of performing household chores. Adcock earlier founded flying taxi company Archer Aviation Inc. Hark is developing a line of custom AI models that it says will provide "advanced personalized intelligence." According to the company, the algorithms will feature a multimodal architecture and persistent memory that will enable them to save user preferences. They will use the stored information to proactively generate task suggestions. Hark plans to ship its models with a line of AI-optimized devices. According to the company, the gadgets are designed to "interact naturally with people and the real world." It positions them as an alternative to traditional ways of accessing AI services. A demo video on Hark's website indicates that its AI models can reserve restaurant tables, make e-commerce purchases and perform research. There's also support for voice commands. It's unclear whether the models will be capable of automating business tasks. Companies often run frontier multimodal models in the cloud. If Hark's devices are adopted by a significant number of users, the cost of performing cloud-based inference could become prohibitively high. As a result, it's possible that the company will opt to build less advanced, more cost-efficient models that can run locally on user devices. Last year, Google LLC released a multimodal model optimized for devices with limited processing capacity. Gemma 3n includes 6 billion parameters, but uses significantly fewer parameters in practice to reduce hardware requirements. A module called MatFormer enables developers to disable parts of the models that aren't needed for an app. It's possible Hark will equip its algorithms with similar optimizations. The company plans to roll out its first models this summer. Its consumer devices will launch at an unspecified later date. According to TechCrunch, Hark will use its newly raised capital to hire more hardware engineers, AI researchers and designers. The company also plans to upgrade its AI training infrastructure. Hark trains its models using an on-premises cluster of Blackwell B200 graphics cards. "We're building the AI that everyone deserves but no one has built yet -- one that actually knows you, speaks your language, is highly personalized, and lives on hardware made for you," Adcock said.

Hark Raises $700 Million For AI Hardware Development | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. The company says its Series A, announced Thursday (May 21), will help it with its effort of pairing Hark's foundation models with hardware "to create a universal interface between humans and machines." Hark added that it plans to use the funds to hire as it secures the infrastructure it needs, with plans to train the next generation of its models at the company's Nvidia B200 data center. "We're ambitious, but we recognize the incredible challenges ahead. We plan to amplify human capacity, autonomy, and joy with an adept, personalized AI assistant," the company wrote in its announcement. "This is a time when the right way is the hard way. And the right approach requires a blend of bespoke-crafted software and hardware." Hark founder and CEO Brett Adcock had discussed the company's plans in an interview with Bloomberg News earlier, months after the startup hired former Apple designer Abidur Chowdhury as its head of design. "We do believe that there's more than one device to rule the world here," Adcock said. "We're working on a family of AI devices both for yourself and for the home." He added that devices will be "distinct from existing handsets, wearables and smart glasses," with the goal of making the products feel so essential that being without them would be like "a day of lost information." In other AI news, recent research from PYMNTS Intelligence shows that the real signal that consumers are adopting the technology isn't in them using it for extraordinary tasks, but for everyday things like summarizing emails, drafting messages or organizing schedules. The technology is becoming less visible because it is becoming more useful, the report said, arguing that the closest analogue isn't the rise of the smartphone or social media boom, but the embrace of mobile banking. Consumers, PYMNTS, wrote, did not wake up one day eager to entrust their finances to their phone screens. "Adoption happened incrementally through convenience and repetition. First came balance checks. Then deposits. Then peer-to-peer transfers. Over time, confidence accumulated through low-risk interactions until the behavior itself became normalized," the report said. "Consumers today are not building trust in AI because they are mesmerized by the technology. They are building trust because technology increasingly removes friction from ordinary life."