Hark debuts an AI agent a year before its first devices

Brett Adcock's Hark just launched Hark Pro, a software agent that handles everyday tasks like grocery shopping, booking cars, paying bills, and managing a kid's lunch account. It's free with optional $20 and $100 monthly tiers, and it works on the web plus iOS and Android apps. The timing is notable because Hark won't ship actual hardware until 2027—the company raised $700 million at a $6 billion valuation earlier this year from Nvidia, AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, and Qualcomm, with Adcock personally putting in $100 million. Meta beat them to this punch, launching an almost identical agent called Muse just four weeks ago with the same pricing structure and feature set. The software runs on Hark's cloud system called Handoff, which remembers instructions and supposedly manages up to six browser windows simultaneously while logging into millions of sites. The company stores payment details and passwords in an encrypted vault it claims it can't access itself. Hark shows off the tech's capabilities through examples like detecting a low lunch balance from emails and refilling it automatically, or inferring from flight confirmations that a hotel booking is missing and handling it. The design team, led by former Apple iPhone Air designer Abidur Chowdhury, says the eventual hardware will be portable and useful at home and work—explicitly ruling out glasses with cameras or wearable pins. Here's the wrinkle: nobody outside the company has actually seen the hardware, and Europe presents a real problem neither Hark nor its competitors have solved. European payment rules require strong customer authentication tied to a specific payee and amount, written with human approval in mind. An agent making payments on someone's behalf doesn't fit that framework cleanly, and Hark hasn't clarified whether Hark Pro even works in Europe at all. OpenAI's hardware device, a $300 speaker designed by Jony Ive's studio, faces the same 2027 timeline and the same regulatory uncertainty.