The founder who built Figure AI’s $39B robot empire is now targeting the device in your pocket and he’s brought Apple’s iPhone Air designer along with $800M

• Brett Adcock has self-funded Hark with $100 million of his personal cash to construct a vertically built-in AI platform combining in-house basis fashions, purpose-built {hardware}, and new interfaces, all designed from scratch collectively.

• The corporate poached Abidur Chowdhury, the Apple designer credited with main the iPhone Air, to go product design, a direct sign that Hark is concentrating on the buyer computing platform, not simply one other chat interface.

• The AI {hardware} market is projected to develop from $83.4 billion in 2025 to $361.7 billion by 2035, in line with Cervicorn Consulting, at a CAGR of 15.8% and Hark enters it earlier than transport a single product.

When Abidur Chowdhury walked Apple’s stage to introduce the iPhone Air, few anticipated him to depart inside months. He did, after a single assembly with Brett Adcock. Now he’s Director of Design at Hark, a San Jose-based AI lab that Adcock based in late 2025 with $100 million of his personal capital and a conviction that each AI product constructed up to now has been mistaken.

Hark emerged from eight months of stealth on 24 March 2026. The corporate has 45 workers on the identical campus as Adcock’s different ventures, with headcount focused at 100 by mid-2026. It has disclosed no product, no value, and no {hardware} type issue, solely a timeline: AI fashions this summer season, native {hardware} shortly after.

What Hark really builds

Most AI firms decide a layer of the stack: fashions, software program, or {hardware} and work from there. Hark builds all three concurrently. The corporate is growing multimodal basis fashions able to processing speech, textual content, imaginative and prescient, and contextual reminiscence, alongside purpose-built client {hardware} designed particularly for these fashions. The acknowledged objective is an always-on private AI that remembers your life, anticipates duties, and operates as a background layer beneath every part you do moderately than an app you open.

The issue Adcock targets is mundane however costly in time: the cognitive overhead of every day coordination. Reserving journey, filling types, planning house renovations, switching between fragmented apps. “The AI methods I exploit right now are removed from my imaginative and prescient of what the long run ought to be,” Adcock stated within the firm’s launch assertion. “We wish to create intelligence that allows you to offload your psychological workload right into a system that begins to assume such as you and generally forward of you.”

The crew

Chowdhury frames the design drawback by way of stack place. “Only a few individuals are actually going after what the long run is,” he informed TechCrunch at launch. “There’s a lot that we could possibly be doing if intelligence was on the base layer of every part we touched as a substitute of turning into an app or an internet site at that higher layer.” He has explicitly dominated out wearables as Hark’s route, distancing the corporate from the shape components which have outlined and most often killed, earlier AI {hardware} makes an attempt.

The AI analysis bench contains alumni of Meta’s Superintelligence Lab. The {hardware} crew attracts from Apple, Tesla, and Meta, with engineers protecting mechanical, electrical, firmware, embedded methods, and provide chain. Hark has additionally signed a deal to carry hundreds of Nvidia B200 GPUs on-line in April to assist multimodal pre-training.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang commented on the partnership: “The brand new period of private AI might be outlined by clever brokers that perceive context, cause throughout modalities, and act on our behalf. Bringing that imaginative and prescient to life requires monumental compute to construct highly effective multimodal basis fashions, and we’re excited to assist Hark’s work with NVIDIA accelerated computing.”

Funding

Hark’s $100 million seed is fully private capital from Adcock, who constructed his fortune by way of Vettery (offered to Adecco), Archer Aviation (public through SPAC in 2021), and Determine AI, the humanoid robotics firm at the moment valued at $39 billion. No exterior buyers participated within the seed spherical. Since launch, Hark has raised a $700 million Series A at a $6 billion valuation, led by Parkway Enterprise Capital, a New York agency based in 2019 that beforehand led Figure AI’s $1 billion Series C and has additionally backed SandboxAQ and xAI. Co-investors embrace Nvidia, AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, ARK Make investments, Brookfield, Greycroft, Prime Movers Lab, Align Ventures, and Tamarack World. Whole funding so far stands at $800 million.

Opponents

The AI {hardware} class has a brief, painful monitor file. Humane’s AI Pin launched in 2024 with $240 million in funding and an $850 million valuation; by February 2025 it had shut down, with HP buying its property for $116 million. Rabbit’s R1 gadget launched to comparable criticism. The clearest large-scale competitor is OpenAI, which acquired Jony Ive’s {hardware} startup io Merchandise in Could 2025 for $6.5 billion and is growing a screenless ambient AI gadget anticipated in late 2026. Meta’s Ray-Ban good glasses signify the one AI {hardware} product to realize significant client traction up to now, however function in a narrower use case.

Hark differentiates itself from all three on one level: vertical integration from day one. Humane and Rabbit constructed units round third-party fashions that weren’t succesful sufficient to justify the {hardware}. OpenAI is integrating fashions and {hardware} retroactively by way of an acquisition. Hark is designing fashions, software program, and {hardware} as a single system from the beginning — a guess that the interface benefits of that method outweigh the capital and execution dangers of doing every part directly.

Market

The global AI in hardware market was valued at $83.4 billion in 2025 and is projected to succeed in $361.7 billion by 2035, rising at a CAGR of 15.8%, in line with Cervicorn Consulting. Mordor Intelligence places the sting AI {hardware} phase particularly at $30.7 billion in 2026, rising to $68.7 billion by 2031 at a 17.5% CAGR — the phase most straight related to the always-on, on-device AI Hark is constructing.

Hark’s first AI fashions will inform buyers and the market whether or not the foundational layer of the corporate is aggressive. The {hardware} query: what it appears like, what it prices, and whether or not anybody buys it, comes second. In a class the place each well-funded, design-credentialled crew earlier than it has both shut down or not but shipped, the extra attention-grabbing query could also be whether or not vertical integration is the answer, or simply the costliest model of the identical drawback.