Brett Adcock's Hark Raises $700 Million Series A at $6 Billion Valuation to Build Personal AI Hardware

Overview

Hark, an AI startup building personalized foundation models and dedicated consumer hardware, has raised $700 million in an oversubscribed Series A at a $6 billion post-money valuation, according to TechCrunch. The round, announced May 21, 2026, was led by Parkway Venture Capital and attracted a broad coalition of chipmakers and enterprise tech investors, signaling early strategic bets on the company’s unannounced hardware.

What We Know

Hark was founded in late 2025 by Brett Adcock, who seeded the company with $100 million of his own capital, The Next Web reports. Adcock simultaneously serves as chief executive of Figure AI, the humanoid robotics company he also founded, and remains chief executive there while also leading Hark. His prior ventures include Vettery, a recruiting marketplace sold to Adecco for $100 million; Archer Aviation, which went public via SPAC in 2021; and Cover, a school-security company, according to The Next Web.

The Series A syndicate includes Nvidia, Align Ventures, AMD Ventures, ARK Invest, Brookfield, Greycroft, Intel Capital, Prime Movers Lab, Qualcomm Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and Tamarack Global, as reported by TechCrunch. Qatalyst Partners provided strategic and financial advisory for the round, The Next Web notes.

Hark describes its product as a personal AI platform pairing in-house foundation models with AI-native hardware designed as a universal interface between humans and machines. SiliconANGLE reports that the company’s models are built around multimodal architecture and persistent memory, with demonstrated use cases including restaurant reservations, e-commerce purchases, research, and voice commands. The company runs an on-premises cluster of Blackwell B200 graphics cards for model training, per SiliconANGLE.

Adcock described the company’s ambition in a statement quoted by SiliconANGLE: “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.”

Abidur Chowdhury, Director of Design and a former Apple product executive, articulated what the company sees as an unmet need in the current AI market, as quoted by TechCrunch: “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.”

Fresh capital will go toward recruiting hardware engineers, AI researchers, and designers, as well as upgrading AI training infrastructure, SiliconANGLE reports.

What We Don’t Know

Hark has not disclosed the form factor, target price, launch market, or customer pipeline for its planned hardware devices, The Next Web notes. The company has said only that its first multimodal models will arrive in summer 2026, with hardware following at an unspecified later date. Adcock has not addressed publicly how he intends to divide his time between Hark and Figure AI, where he remains chief executive.

Analysis

The presence of Nvidia, AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm in the same funding syndicate is notable. Each chipmaker is investing at the Series A stage, before any hardware component choices have been locked in, a positioning that suggests each sees Hark as a potential design-win opportunity for its own silicon.

The personal AI hardware category carries a fraught recent history. Humane’s AI Pin is, in The Next Web’s characterization, “the most public cautionary tale of 2024,” with the Rabbit R1 “close behind.” Both products launched to poor reviews and failed to find a sustainable audience, demonstrating how difficult it is to displace the smartphone as the primary computing surface.

Hark’s approach — developing foundation models and hardware together under one roof, as TechCrunch describes, rather than layering software onto commodity devices — contrasts with the model Humane and Rabbit pursued. Whether that vertical integration is an advantage depends primarily on the quality of Hark’s models, which remain unreleased. The company’s summer 2026 model launch will be the first real test of whether the technical approach justifies a $6 billion valuation before a single device has shipped.