Brett Adcock has built and sold companies in robotics, security, and air taxis, and now he wants to reinvent how people use artificial intelligence. His latest project, Hark, is a new laboratory that combines personal intelligence with custom-designed hardware. Rather than specializing in models or hardware alone, Hark aims to have the entire product line – foundation models, software systems, hardware and user interfaces – under one roof. The company has recruited top talent from Apple and Meta to build an AI product that better bridges the gap between humans and machines.
“The AI systems I use today are a far cry from my vision of what the future should be,” Adcock said in a statement. “We want to create intelligence that lets you offload your mental workload to a system that starts thinking like you and sometimes even ahead of you.”
Hark is the latest in a series of ambitious projects launched by Adcock. He has previously funded recruitment marketplace Vettery; Archer, which makes electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft (eVTOLs); and Cover, an AI security company that develops weapon detection systems. Hadcock also remains CEO of Viger, a robotics startup he founded in 2022 that develops humanoid robots to automate labor. Figure, which tests AI agents on its own robots but will remain a separate company from HARK, will be valued at $39 billion in 2025.
Right now, the Hark project is funded entirely with Adcock’s own money: $100 million in personal capital. The businessman who has Her net worth is estimated at $19.1 billionwants to create multimodal AI systems that handle speech, text, vision, and context, with layers of personal memory, proactive behavior, and real-time speech capabilities.
These systems are intended to work in conjunction with Hark’s own hardware. Leading the effort is Abidur Chowdhury, who was hired as chief design officer after seven years as an industrial designer at Apple, where he worked on iPhone and Mac products like the recent iPhone Air. “We believe that the future is a new interface that will understand you, intelligently anticipate your needs, and love doing the tasks you don’t want to do,” Choudhary said in a statement.
The broader HARK team includes AI researchers and engineers from some of the largest companies in Silicon Valley. On the hardware side, the hires include longtime Apple employees such as David Narajowski and Dave Wilkes, who worked on product development and audio hardware systems engineering. On the AI side, the company has brought in top researchers from Meta’s Superintelligence Lab, including Mingbo Ma, Xubo Liu, Xianfeng Rui, Kainan Peng, and Zhihong Lei. Hark’s headcount, which also includes talent from Google, Amazon and Tesla, is about 45 today and is expected to reach 100 in the first half of 2026.
To speed up development of the model, Hark has struck a computing deal with Nvidia that will bring thousands of GPUs online next month for pre- and post-training on its systems.
Hark enters a crowded field of projects trying to rethink how people interact with AI, and OpenAI has enlisted former Apple design chief Jony Ive for the task. The device project is still secretWhile Meta is betting big on… Smart glasses powered by artificial intelligence. Newer hardware startups, like Sandbar, have raised millions to develop wearables with custom AI at their core.
Adcock says Hark will begin rolling out its first AI prototypes this summer, followed soon by hardware designed around those systems. “We believe the next computing platform will be personal AI, intelligence that understands you and works with you every day,” he said. “But this future will only become possible when the whole group is built together.”
