Figure Founder Invests $100M to Launch Hark Lab, Ex-Apple iPhone Air Designer Joins to Develop New Personal AI Devices

Figure CEO Brett Adcock, founder of the humanoid robot company, announced the launch of a new AI lab called Hark, aiming to build the world's most advanced personal intelligence system by deeply integrating self-developed multimodal models with custom hardware. The lab has been operating secretly for 8 months, funded by Adcock's personal $100 million investment, with his net worth estimated at $19.1 billion by Forbes.

On the team front, former Apple industrial designer Abidur Chowdhury (who participated in designing products like iPhone Air) serves as design head. The hardware team includes Apple veterans David Narajowski and Dave Wilkes, while AI researchers are recruited from Meta's Superintelligence Lab. Currently, the team has about 45 members and plans to expand to 100 by the first half of the year, with members also coming from Google, Amazon, and Tesla. Hark has reached a computing power agreement with Nvidia, and thousands of GPUs will go online next month for model training.

Adcock is a serial entrepreneur. Figure, founded in 2022, has a latest valuation of $39 billion. He previously founded companies like recruitment platform Vettery. Figure will remain independently operated.