Undercover for two months, the Figure and Archer founder has a chip and model stack and a chip and model stack size check to match.
Brett Adcock’s self-funded AI startup Hark raised more than $700 million in Series A funding late last year. Bloomberg.
The round closed about two months after Hark came out of stealth, putting the company in the upper echelon of AI hardware before shipping the product.
Parkway Venture Capital led the round. The list of investors reads like a Who’s Who of the chip and cloud stack: Nvidia, AMD Ventures, Intel Capital and Qualcomm Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Brookfield, ARK Invest, Greycroft, Prime Movers Lab, Align Ventures and Tamarack Global wrote checks. Several of these 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 $100 million of his own money, following founding companies that are now public, acquired or among the better-funded private operators in their categories.
He co-founded recruitment marketplace Vettery, which was sold to Adecco for $100 million; Founded Archer Aviation, an electric aircraft manufacturer that went public through a SPAC in 2021; founded humanoid robotics company Figure, where he remains chief executive; and founded the school security company Cover. He is also the principal of Hark School.
What Hark actually builds is less crisp than what he lifts. The company described itself as a developer “Personal AI Platform” it pairs internal foundational models, software, and native hardware with new interfaces, rather than selecting one layer of the stack.
according to BusinessWire announcement in March, Hark intends to release its first multimodal models this summer.
The category Hark is in is small, expensive, and full of failures. Humane’s AI Pin has become the most public cautionary tale of 2024, with Rabbit R1 trailing behind. Even Apple, which has a hardware distribution machine like no other, spent last year trying to figure out what its AI offering on a device would actually look like.
The case for Adcock is that it has shipped hardware before in Archer and Image, and the integration of models and silicon from day one is the betting version that is most likely to produce a defensible product.
What Hark hasn’t disclosed yet: headcount, hardware form factor, target price, sales market or customer pipeline. Series A takes time to keep it more opaque for a while.
With both Nvidia and AMD, supply allocation, often a binding constraint for AI hardware companies in 2026, becomes a question that Hark can answer more comfortably than most of his peers.
What the tour doesn’t buy fits the product market. Hark joins a category where several well-funded, well-credentialed teams have been launched, released and quietly fired. According to the company’s own timeline, the first models are weeks away; the device that turns those models into a business is still a long way off.
