Hark raises $700M Series A for its secretive ‘universal’ AI interface

Hark expects to release its first multimodal models this summer, which it says will power a personal AI platform that works with existing products and services. The company expects to follow that with hardware devices built specifically for those systems.

The fresh cash will be spent on recruiting top talent for hardware, product design, and AI research, and on securing compute and components. The company currently has 70 employees and runs a data center with Nvidia B200 GPUs.

Abidur Chowdhury (pictured above in a promo video), a former Apple product executive, is Hark’s director of design. He declined to reveal new details of what he’s working on when TechCrunch peppered him with questions this week but said investors were impressed by a series of demos from his team.

“I haven’t seen anything that feels like something that will really help like the normal person,” Chowdhury said, speaking of the AI products on the market. “People are really building things to help people make software, and it’s working, and it’s really impactful, but we haven’t really seen that for the normal person yet.”

He noted that while Anthropic is prioritizing coding tools and OpenAI is moving in the same direction ahead of its IPO, few companies are focused solely on building interfaces and native hardware the way Hark is. “With this focus, with this great team that we have, and this round that we’ve raised, I think we can make something really special in this space,” Chowdhury said.

Still, there are more questions than answers. One challenge will be providing the context of a customer’s life to an AI assistant without making the people around the user uncomfortable or violating their privacy. Wearables like Meta’s existing glasses or the forthcoming Android spectacles don’t seem to have solved this problem. When asked how he might square this particular circle, Chowdhury only smiled.

“Sounds like that would make a great product.”