Billionaire Brett Adcock Launches New Startup to Build Personal AI

Brett Adcock built and sold companies in robotics, security and air taxis, and now he wants to reinvent the way people use AI. His latest venture, Hark, is a new lab that combines personal intelligence with custom-built hardware. Instead of specializing in only models or devices, Hark aims to own the entire pipeline—base models, software systems, hardware and user interfaces—under one roof. The company hired 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 far from my vision of what the future should be,” Adcock said in a statement. “We want to build intelligence that allows you to offload your mental workload to a system that starts thinking like you and sometimes ahead of you.”

Hark is the latest in a series of ambitious projects undertaken by Adcock. He previously funded the Vettery rental market; Archer, which makes electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOLs) aircraft; and Cover, an AI security company that develops weapons detection systems. Hadcock is also the CEO of Figure, a robotics startup he founded in 2022 that builds humanoid robots to operate autonomously. The firm, which is testing AI agents in its robots but will remain a separate company from Hark, was recently valued at $39 billion by 2025.

Currently, Hark is funded entirely by Adcock’s money: $100 million of personal money. A businessman, who It is estimated at $19.1 billionseeks to build multimodal AI systems that handle speech, text, vision and context, equipped with personal memory, fluent behavior and real-time speech capabilities.

Those systems are designed to work with Hark’s own hardware. Leading that effort is Abidur Chowdhury, who was hired as head of design after seven years as an industrial designer at Apple, where he worked on iPhone and Mac products such as the latest iPhone Air. “We believe the future is a new communication that will understand you, consider your needs intelligently, and love to do the things you don’t want to do,” Chowdhury said in a statement.

Hark’s extensive team includes AI researchers and engineers drawn from some of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies. On the hardware side, hires include longtime Apple employees such as David Narajowski and Dave Wilkes, who worked on product development and audio hardware systems. On the AI ​​side, the company 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 includes talent from Google, Amazon and Tesla, is around 45 today and is expected to reach 100 in the first half of 2026.

To speed up the development of the model, Hark has entered into a computing agreement with Nvidia that will bring thousands of GPUs online next month to pre-train and post-train its programs.

Hark is entering a busy field that is trying to rethink how people interact with AI OpenAI has included former Apple chief design officer Jony Ive a still-secret device projectwhile Meta bets more Smart glasses powered by AI. New hardware startups like Sandbar have raised millions to develop wearables with personal AI at their core.

Adcock says Hark will begin releasing its first AI models this summer, followed soon by hardware devices designed around those systems. “We believe the next platform for computing will be personal AI — intelligence that understands and works with you every day,” he said. “But that future can only happen when the whole stack is built together.”