AI startup Hark has released its first product, Hark Pro, a digital assistant designed to act on its own rather than wait for instructions. The company, founded in late 2025 by serial founder Brett Adcock — previously behind the EVTOL startup Archer Aviation and humanoid robotics firm Figure — calls the software an "operating system for your life" built around persistent memory and computer use.
Unlike conventional chatbots that answer questions on demand, Hark Pro plugs into a user's email, calendar and other online accounts, then anticipates what needs doing. According to Fast Company, the assistant can spot meeting clashes and reschedule around them, notify a user that a rental car was booked at the wrong airport and offer to fix it, or find a dentist that accepts the user's insurance and book the appointment. Its home screen organizes these as action buttons — pay a bill, check in for a flight, approve a delivery — alongside widgets that track orders, balances and reminders.
The engine behind it is Handoff, the company's own computer that navigates the internet and performs tasks through real websites rather than calling each service's API. A small window in the chat log shows the agent working, a design choice the company says is meant to build trust with users handing over deep account access, including email and credit card details.
Hark Pro is available in a limited-use free version, with paid subscriptions starting at $20 a month. The startup's head of design is Abidur Chowdhury, formerly the design lead for Apple's iPhone Air, who calls the interface a customizable "homepage" for one's digital life.
The ambitions go further than software. The company plans to release its first hardware device in 2027 — what Chowdhury describes as a completely new form factor built specifically around its AI systems. That push is bankrolled by a $700 million Series A round, which Fast Company reports Hark has already raised since its launch. In a keynote video announcing the release, Adcock said: "Eventually I want Hark to handle all things I do on a computer, fully end-to-end, so that I never have to use a computer again, at least not a computer as we know it."
Hark enters a crowded field: Meta's Muse assistant and OpenAI's Dots both launched in recent weeks, according to Fast Company. Its differentiator is the privacy pitch — as Chowdhury put it to TechCrunch, the company is "not here to like sell you ads and steal your data" — and a model trained specifically for computer use rather than a general frontier LLM.
Sources: Hark Pro rethinks the chatbot with a proactive AI assistant (Fast Company) | Hark releases an AI personal assistant with a focus on privacy (TechCrunch)
Unlike conventional chatbots that answer questions on demand, Hark Pro plugs into a user's email, calendar and other online accounts, then anticipates what needs doing. According to Fast Company, the assistant can spot meeting clashes and reschedule around them, notify a user that a rental car was booked at the wrong airport and offer to fix it, or find a dentist that accepts the user's insurance and book the appointment. Its home screen organizes these as action buttons — pay a bill, check in for a flight, approve a delivery — alongside widgets that track orders, balances and reminders.
The engine behind it is Handoff, the company's own computer that navigates the internet and performs tasks through real websites rather than calling each service's API. A small window in the chat log shows the agent working, a design choice the company says is meant to build trust with users handing over deep account access, including email and credit card details.
Hark Pro is available in a limited-use free version, with paid subscriptions starting at $20 a month. The startup's head of design is Abidur Chowdhury, formerly the design lead for Apple's iPhone Air, who calls the interface a customizable "homepage" for one's digital life.
The ambitions go further than software. The company plans to release its first hardware device in 2027 — what Chowdhury describes as a completely new form factor built specifically around its AI systems. That push is bankrolled by a $700 million Series A round, which Fast Company reports Hark has already raised since its launch. In a keynote video announcing the release, Adcock said: "Eventually I want Hark to handle all things I do on a computer, fully end-to-end, so that I never have to use a computer again, at least not a computer as we know it."
Hark enters a crowded field: Meta's Muse assistant and OpenAI's Dots both launched in recent weeks, according to Fast Company. Its differentiator is the privacy pitch — as Chowdhury put it to TechCrunch, the company is "not here to like sell you ads and steal your data" — and a model trained specifically for computer use rather than a general frontier LLM.
Sources: Hark Pro rethinks the chatbot with a proactive AI assistant (Fast Company) | Hark releases an AI personal assistant with a focus on privacy (TechCrunch)
