Brett Adcock made his name in hardware: first as co-founder of electric air-taxi developer Archer Aviation, then as founder of Figure AI, the humanoid robotics company backed by Microsoft, BMW and OpenAI. With Hark, his newest venture, he is reversing the order of operations — software first, machines later. The debut product, Hark Pro, ships now as a desktop AI agent, free with paid tiers, funded by a closed $700 million round at a $6 billion valuation. Hardware is slated for 2027.
Key takeaways:
- Software before hardware: Hark Pro is live on web, iOS and Android, free with $20 and $100 monthly tiers. Devices arrive in 2027.
- An agent, not a chatbot: the Handoff cloud system remembers context and handles groceries, bill payments, bookings and trip planning.
- Europe is unresolved: PSD2’s authentication rules offer no exemption for software-approved payments, and no European launch is confirmed.
- Crowded field: Meta’s Muse launched at the same three price points weeks earlier, while OpenAI hardware is due in 2027.
An agent that takes over the desktop
Hark Pro does not live inside a single application. It operates at the desktop level, driving any web interface: filling forms, extracting structured data and making decisions from the visual context on screen. Launch materials cited 36 compatible browsers — Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge and a long catalogue of enterprise and developer browsers — though the company later clarified that its cloud backend runs up to six browser sessions at once. The breadth is deliberate: finance, logistics and operations teams rarely standardise on the same browser as consumers, and broad compatibility defuses an adoption objection before corporate IT raises it.
Underneath sits Handoff, a cloud system that stores what it is told — formatting habits, interests, recurring preferences — and reapplies that context across sessions. The interface is built around proactive cards drawn from connected email and calendar accounts, plus Action Buttons that pay a bill or cancel a service in one tap; users can also assemble their own mini apps. In demonstrations the agent has surfaced expenses awaiting approval, a booked flight with no matching hotel, and a colleague’s expiring car registration at the California DMV, which it renewed end to end.
Abidur Chowdhury, who leads design at Hark after working on Apple’s iPhone Air, frames the problem as one of interface rather than model capability:
“I think it’s hilarious that right now AI is essentially where you have a chatbot and you type into it and it gives you a response. Our goal as a company is almost to build a graphical user interface to this future technology.”
Hark also leans on privacy as differentiation. “We’re not here to like sell you ads and steal your data,” Chowdhury said. The counterweight is that a genuinely useful agent still needs access to email, calendars, files and payment credentials — a trust threshold that remains steepest with corporate buyers.
Europe’s payment rules block the financial layer
The European edition of Hark Pro confronts a barrier its American counterpart does not. The second Payment Services Directive (PSD2) mandates strong customer authentication for digital financial transactions, and an agent acting on a user’s behalf inevitably enters payment flows. The rules were written for a human approving a transaction tied to a named payee and a known amount, with no carve-out for autonomous software. Adcock has acknowledged that full deployment of the agent’s financial features in Europe must wait for greater regulatory clarity, and Hark has not confirmed whether Hark Pro is sold there at all. Payments firms are working the problem from their side — Mastercard has introduced virtual cards intended to let AI agents transact autonomously — but infrastructure alone cannot close an interpretive gap that varies between national banking regulators.
The Figure AI lesson and a crowded market
The software-first sequencing reads as a direct lesson from Figure AI. Robotic hardware cycles are long, expensive and unpredictable, so shipping a desktop agent first lets Hark accumulate what Figure lacked early on: real users, production behaviour data and a validated business model. If the app reaches paying users through 2026, the 2027 devices arrive with a defined use case, a known customer segment and distribution that does not depend on building a robotics supply chain from scratch.
The market, however, is unforgiving. Meta’s Muse went live four weeks earlier at the same free, $20 and $100 ladder and settles payments through Stripe’s Link. OpenAI is preparing a first device for 2027. Hark’s $700 million round — with Nvidia, AMD Ventures, Intel Capital and Qualcomm Ventures participating, and $100 million of Adcock’s own money committed first — buys time, not immunity.
The sharpest risk is behavioural rather than technical. An agent that operates an entire desktop needs genuine permission over someone’s applications and browser, a demanding ask inside organisations with restrictive IT policies. Hark’s funding buys the runway to earn that trust. Whether the company spends it patiently is the open variable, and the Figure AI record suggests Adcock understands that large markets are built on long timelines.