Flying Car Billionaire Brett Adcock Launches Startup to Build Personal A.I.
Brett Adcock has built and sold companies in robotics, security and air taxis, and now he wants to reinvent how people use A.I. His latest venture, Hark, is a new lab that pairs personalized intelligence with custom-built hardware. Instead of specializing in models or devices alone, Hark aims to own the whole pipeline—foundation models, software systems, hardware and user interfaces—under one roof. The company has recruited top talent from Apple and Meta to build an A.I. product that better bridges the gap between humans and machines.
“The A.I. systems I use today are far from my vision of what the future should be,” said Adcock in a statement. “We want to create intelligence that lets you offload your mental workload into a system that begins to think like you and sometimes ahead of you.”
Hark is the latest in a string of ambitious projects launched by Adcock. He previously funded the hiring marketplace Vettery; Archer, which builds electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (eVTOLs); and Cover, an A.I. security company developing weapon-detection systems. Hadcock also remains CEO of Figure, a robotics startup he founded in 2022 that is developing humanoid robots to automate labor. Figure, which is testing A.I. agents on its robots but will remain a separate company from Hark, was most recently valued at $39 billion in 2025.
For now, Hark is financed entirely by Adcock’s own money: $100 million in personal capital. The entrepreneur, who has an estimated net worth of $19.1 billion, wants to build multimodal A.I. systems that handle speech, text, vision and context, layered with personalized memory, proactive behavior and real-time speech capabilities.
Those systems are meant to work hand in hand with Hark’s own hardware. Leading that effort is Abidur Chowdhury, 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 recent iPhone Air. “We believe that the future is a new interface that will understand you, intelligently anticipate your needs, and love doing tasks that you don’t want to do,” said Chowdhury in a statement.
Hark’s broader team includes A.I. researchers and engineers drawn from some of Silicon Valley’s biggest firms. On the hardware side, hires include longtime Apple staffers like David Narajowski and Dave Wilkes, who worked on product development architecture and audio hardware systems. On the A.I. side, the company has brought in senior 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 model development, Hark has struck a compute deal with Nvidia that will bring thousands of GPUs online next month for pre-training and post-training its systems.
Hark is entering a crowded field of ventures trying to rethink how people interact with A.I. OpenAI has enlisted former Apple design chief Jony Ive for a still-secret device project, while Meta is betting heavily on A.I.-enabled smart glasses. Newer hardware startups like Sandbar have raised millions to develop wearables with personalized A.I. at their core.
Adcock says Hark will begin releasing its first A.I. models this summer, followed shortly by hardware devices designed around those systems. “We believe the next computing platform will be personal A.I.—intelligence that understands you and works alongside you every day,” he said. “But that future only becomes possible when the entire stack is built together.”