Mira Murati raised $2 billion for Thinking Machines Lab before it shipped a product — one of several AI startups now valued in the billions pre-launch(Photo by Craig T Fruchtman/WireImage)
Last week, Brett Adcock's new startup, Hark, raised a $700 million Series A at a $6 billion valuation. Parkway Venture Capital led the round, while Nvidia, AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm all invested — putting virtually every major AI-chip maker on a single cap table. Adcock himself had already put in $100 million of his own.
Hark has been notably secretive about the rest. It’s described a concept — a "universal" agentic AI assistant, part software and part dedicated hardware, meant to be a single interface to everything you do digitally. Beyond that it has stayed deliberately quiet, with the first models promised this summer and hardware to follow. Stealth is pretty ordinary for a young company, but raising $700 million in stealth, pre-product, much less so.
The Round Skips The Company
A Series A used to be a stage marker. Typically, it suggested that a company had built a product, found early customers and needed capital to scale. The number attached to it, usually something in the range of $10 - $30 million, was a rough measure of how far along that company was.
