Brett Adcock, the founder of robotics company Figure AI, is backing a new startup called Hark that's raising hundreds of millions of dollars to completely rethink how people interact with artificial intelligence. The company closed a $700 million Series A funding round in May 2026 at a $6 billion valuation, with major chip makers including Nvidia, AMD, Intel Capital, and Qualcomm Ventures as backers.

Adcock invested $100 million of his own capital to launch Hark in late 2025, signaling deep personal conviction in the company's core argument: every device people currently use to access AI was designed before AI existed, and that fundamental mismatch is holding back what artificial intelligence can do for users.

Why Are Chip Companies Betting Billions on AI Interface Design?

The size of Hark's Series A is striking because the company has not yet shipped a public product. Nvidia, AMD, and Intel are putting chip-company money into a lab whose founding argument is that the screens and devices between people and AI need to be redesigned from the ground up. This signals how much institutional capital is treating the interface layer as a structural bet worth paying for early.

Hark's design director is Abidur Chowdhury, who previously led the design of the iPhone Air at Apple before joining the startup to build AI interfaces that feel native rather than retrofitted onto existing hardware. The company plans to release its first multimodal models, which can process text, images, and other data types simultaneously, this summer.

"Today's AI models aren't nearly intelligent enough, they feel quite dumb, and the devices we use to access them are fundamentally pre-AI," Adcock wrote in a January internal memo shared with TechCrunch.

Brett Adcock, Founder and CEO of Hark

The company describes itself as building AI models and purpose-built hardware in parallel, on the premise that generic devices designed for email, web browsing, and video streaming cannot deliver the experience that advanced AI systems should enable.

How Is Hark's Approach Different From Mainstream AI Companies?

Hark is not alone in this thinking. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky is in the early stages of funding his own AI lab focused on user interaction and design, according to Bloomberg reporting confirmed on June 5, 2026. Chesky has argued publicly for years that travel and e-commerce AI requires richer interfaces than the text-based chatbots that OpenAI and Anthropic have popularized.

Chesky's argument rests on a specific observation about how people make travel decisions. Choosing where to spend a week involves pictures, atmosphere, the feel of a neighborhood, and the quality of light in a particular room. A chatbot that delivers a ranked list of accommodation options doesn't replicate the experience of scrolling through a space and deciding you want to be there.

Airbnb has deliberately stayed out of OpenAI's ChatGPT travel ecosystem, where competitors like Expedia Group and Booking Holdings have integrated their live inventory. Chesky said last year that OpenAI's tools weren't quite ready for what Airbnb wants to deliver. That's a different call from Expedia and Booking.com, which launched their ChatGPT integrations in October 2025 using OpenAI's Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open-source standard that lets AI models connect to external data sources and services.

Steps to Understanding the Interface-First AI Movement

• The Problem: Current AI interfaces rely on text-based chat windows designed before generative AI existed, limiting what users can do and how naturally they can interact with AI systems.
• The Solution: Startups like Hark and labs like Chesky's are building custom hardware and software together from scratch, designed specifically for how AI should work rather than layering AI onto old devices.
• The Investment Signal: Major chip manufacturers backing Hark's $700 million raise signals that the industry believes interface redesign is as important as model improvements for AI's next phase of growth.
• The Timeline: Hark's first multimodal models are expected this summer, while Chesky's lab is in early funding stages with no public timeline yet announced.

The interface-design school of thought faces a structural challenge from a different part of the market, however. Morgan Stanley will soon open its stock administration platforms to external AI agents, according to CNBC reporting from late May 2026. The bank's ShareWorks and Equity Edge platforms serve stock compensation plans for nearly half of S&P 500 companies and eight of the ten largest unicorn startups.

Autonomous AI agents will be able to pull data and administer those plans directly, bypassing the human-facing login screens both platforms currently require. This suggests that in some enterprise contexts, the interface layer may become less important as AI agents handle interactions directly with backend systems.

Chesky's lab is entering a field where the comparable startup already has a nine-figure raise and a hardware-plus-model strategy being built simultaneously. The outcome of this competition will likely shape whether the next generation of AI interaction happens through beautifully designed interfaces that humans control, or through autonomous agents that bypass interfaces altogether.