source: techcrunch ai: hark raises $700m series a for its secretive “universal” ai interface
level: business
hark, an ai lab founded by brett adcock, announced a $700 million series a round at a $6 billion valuation. the funding was led by parkway venture capital and included amd ventures, intel capital, qualcomm ventures, and salesforce ventures. adcock previously started figure.ai and archer, and he launched hark in late 2025 with $100 million of his own money. the company plans to release multimodal models this summer for a personal ai platform that works with existing services, followed by custom hardware.
the company has 70 employees and operates a data center with nvidia b200 gpus. the new funds will go toward hiring for hardware, product design, and ai research, as well as securing more compute and components. abidur chowdhury, a former apple product executive and hark's director of design, said investors were impressed by demos but declined to share new details. he noted that most ai products target software developers, while hark aims to help everyday people.
key challenges include providing an ai assistant with personal context without violating privacy or making others uncomfortable. wearables like meta's glasses have not fully solved this. when asked about privacy, chowdhury only smiled and suggested it would make a great product. the company's secrecy leaves many questions about how it will address these issues while competing with established players moving into similar spaces.
why it matters: the massive early-stage investment signals strong belief in consumer ai hardware and could accelerate development of practical ai assistants for non-technical users.
source: techcrunch ai: hark raises $700m series a for its secretive “universal” ai interface