The Robot Guy Wants to Run Your To-Do List
Brett Adcock has spent the last few years building humanoid robots. Now he wants to handle your dinner reservations.
On October 4, the Figure founder and CEO posted on X that Hark, his personal AI company, will launch this week. The offer is aggressive: the first 100,000 registered users get the paid plan free. A waitlist is open now.
If you have not heard of Hark, you are not behind. The company operated in stealth for months and only surfaced publicly in late 2025, when Adcock revealed he had put $100 million of his own money into the project. Since then, it has grown into one of the most ambitious bets in consumer AI: a personal AI that remembers your preferences, works across the websites you use every day, and eventually connects to dedicated hardware built just for it.
What Hark Actually Is
Forget the chatbot comparison. Hark’s pitch is an AI that does things, not one that answers questions.
The clearest preview of that vision came on August 5, when the company showed off Hark Handoff, a research preview of its browser agent. Handoff drives a virtual computer: it opens a browser, clicks, scrolls, types, reads files, and runs terminal commands. The work it is aimed at is refreshingly ordinary: placing food orders, shopping online, booking restaurant tables, researching and arranging travel.
That last point is the design choice that matters. Handoff interacts with websites the way people do, clicking through real pages, instead of depending on each service to build a separate integration. That means it works with sites that have no public API. The trade-off is honest too: it also means Hark depends on websites that can change their layouts, block automated activity, or demand human verification checks. The company will be fighting that battle on every site it touches.
The longer-term vision is bigger. Hark’s manifesto describes a system that builds a rich, evolving understanding of its user, keeps persistent memory across conversations and tasks, and eventually connects to dedicated hardware built just for it.
The Money and the Team
Hark has funded this ambition at startup-superstar scale. The company has raised more than $700 million in Series A capital, and it assembled a team of 45 engineers and designers early on, including former Meta AI researchers and designers from Apple and Tesla. There is also a strategic thread running through Adcock’s empire: Hark’s models are already being trained on data from Figure’s robots, and the company secured a deal with Nvidia for thousands of GPUs for training.
Adcock will keep running Figure as CEO alongside Hark. The two companies are separate, with no announced plan to merge, but the overlap is obvious: robots that understand the physical world and personal AI that understands your life are two halves of the same idea.
Adcock says he now uses the product for everything. He did not say how long the free paid plan lasts for those first 100,000 users, or what exactly it includes. Details like that usually surface at launch.
Why Launch Week Matters
The consumer AI agent space has been all promise and very little product. Every demo video shows a flawless agent booking the perfect trip. Almost none of them survive contact with real websites, real edge cases, real CAPTCHAs.
That is exactly why a real launch matters. DigitalOcean spent last week packaging agent infrastructure into one monthly bill, because agents are getting serious enough that the machinery around them is a business. Metaview raised $60 million to put agents to work in recruiting. The agent economy is moving from slides to products. Hark is the first big bet that the consumer side can work too.
The 100,000-user free offer is the classic consumer playbook: remove every reason not to try it. Adcock is betting that once people hand their errands to an agent that remembers them, they will not go back to doing it themselves. He is probably right about the psychology. The question is whether the product is ready.
The Takeaway
Hark is either the start of the post-app era or a very expensive lesson in how hard the real web is. Both outcomes are interesting.
If you are one of the curious, the waitlist is open and the first 100,000 paid plans are free. If you are one of the skeptical, fair: a research preview in August is a long way from an agent you can trust with your credit card. The honest move is the same for both groups. Watch this week’s launch for one thing only: does it handle the boring stuff, reliably, on the websites people actually use?
That is the whole test. Agents that can answer hiring questions or move boxes in warehouses are already proving themselves in narrow lanes. Hark is trying the wide lane: everything, for everyone. Nobody has pulled that off yet. This week, we find out if the robot guy is the one who does.
