Technology and Science21 May, 20262 min read
Hark Raises $700M Series A Led By Parkway Venture Capital At $6B Valuation
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Hark raised over $700 million in an oversubscribed Series A. Post-money valuation reached about $6 billion, per multiple outlets.
Hark’s $700M bet
Hark, a stealthy AI startup founded by Brett Adcock, raised over $700 million in an oversubscribed Series A at a $6 billion post-money valuation to build a “universal interface” between humans and machines. The round was led by Parkway Venture Capital and included investors such as NVIDIA, AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, ARK Invest, Salesforce Ventures, Brookfield, Greycroft, Align Ventures, Prime Movers Lab, and Tamarack Global, according to Hark’s disclosures. Hark said the funding supports hiring and expanded compute, with the company describing itself as having roughly 70 employees and operating its own data center featuring NVIDIA B200 GPUs.
Adcock framed the effort as a shift from chatbot-centric tools, saying in a statement, “We’re building the AI that everyone deserves but no one has built yet — one that actually knows you, speaks your language, is highly personalized, and lives on hardware made for you.” Hark also said it plans to release its first multimodal models later this summer, followed by hardware devices tailored to those models.
Designers and demos
Abidur Chowdhury, Hark’s director of design and a former Apple product executive, emphasized the gap in consumer-facing AI, telling TechCrunch, “I haven’t seen anything that feels like something that will really help like the normal person.” Chowdhury also said investors were impressed by internal demos while he declined to reveal new details of what he’s working on when TechCrunch peppered him with questions this week. In Hark’s own announcement, the company said it is developing agentic and multimodal models that “will work across the products and services you already use,” managing a user’s digital world as a “caring, capable assistant.”
PYMNTS Intelligence, as cited by PYMNTS, argued that adoption is driven by everyday uses like “summarizing emails, drafting messages or organizing schedules,” rather than extraordinary tasks. When asked about privacy and the risk of making people around a user uncomfortable, Chowdhury only smiled, saying, “Sounds like that would make a great product.”
What’s at stake
Hark’s bet is that pairing foundation models with hardware can create a “universal interface between humans and machines,” with PYMNTS noting the company’s Series A was announced Thursday (May 21). The company said it plans to train the next generation of its models at its Nvidia B200 data center, tying the funding to compute infrastructure and model development. TechCrunch reported that Hark expects to follow its first multimodal models with hardware devices built specifically for those systems, while also spending the fresh cash on recruiting for hardware, product design, and AI research.
“Sounds like that would make a great product.”
The stakes are sharpened by the fact that Hark has revealed “how little Hark has revealed about what it is building,” even as it positions itself against software-first competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic. For Hark, the next few months hinge on whether its privacy-respecting approach to providing a customer’s life context can work without violating privacy or making bystanders uncomfortable, a challenge Chowdhury addressed with the same line, “Sounds like that would make a great product.”