Brett Adcock bets $100M that personal AI needs its own body

BRETT ADCOCK has a habit of starting companies that sound implausible and then raising eye-watering sums to will them into existence. He sold his first startup, a recruiting marketplace called Vettery, to Adecco for $100 million. He co-founded Archer Aviation and took it public at $2.7 billion. Then came Figure AI, a humanoid robotics firm that raised over $1 billion last year and now carries a $39 billion valuation — making Adcock, a farm kid from central Illinois, worth an estimated $19 billion according to Forbes. Now he has started Hark, a new AI lab seeded with $100 million of his own capital, and the pitch is characteristically grand: build the most advanced personal intelligence on the planet, paired with bespoke hardware designed to serve as the interface between humans and machines.