Brett Adcock Funds New AI Hardware Company Hark With $100 Million
Brett Adcock, founder of robotics company Figure AI, is backing a new venture called Hark with $100 million of his own money. The company plans to build integrated AI hardware and software designed to function as a background layer in users' daily lives, handling routine cognitive tasks without constant input.
Hark differs from typical AI startups by combining in-house models, custom software, and purpose-built hardware from the ground up rather than adapting existing technologies.
Design Leadership From Apple
Adcock hired Abidur Chowdhury, an Apple designer who worked on the iPhone Air, to lead product design. This signals Hark's intention to build a consumer computing platform rather than a simple application or service.
The company is developing multimodal models that process speech, text, vision, and contextual memory alongside hardware engineered specifically for these models.
Funding and Investor Backing
After Adcock's initial $100 million investment, Hark raised a $700 million Series A round led by Parkway Venture Capital, valuing the company at $6 billion. Nvidia, AMD Ventures, and Intel Capital joined as co-investors.
The company has partnered with Nvidia to deploy thousands of GPUs for multimodal model training.
Market Entry Before Product Launch
Hark enters the AI hardware market without shipping a product yet. Other companies like OpenAI and Humane have struggled in this space, but Hark's vertical integration approach-controlling models, software, and hardware together-positions it differently.
The success of this strategy depends on delivering products that meet actual consumer needs rather than solving problems users don't have.
For product development professionals, Hark's model offers a case study in vertical integration. Learn more about AI for Product Development and explore how AI Design Courses can inform hardware-software integration strategies.
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