Bio

Brett Adcock is an American technology entrepreneur, born April 6, 1986 in Moweaqua, Illinois. He is the founder and chief executive officer of Figure AI, the humanoid-robotics company he started in May 2022, and the founder of Hark, the personal-intelligence AI lab he established in 2025 with $100 million of his own capital. As of May 2026, Adcock concurrently leads both companies, with Figure AI carrying a reported $39.5 billion valuation as of February 2025 and his net worth estimated at approximately $19 billion.

At a glance

• Education: Bachelor of Science in business administration, University of Florida (2008). Valedictorian, Central A&M High School, Moweaqua, Illinois.
• Current roles: Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Figure AI (May 2022 to present); Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Hark (2025 to present).
• Key contributions: co-founder of Vettery (2013, sold to Adecco for approximately $100 million in 2018); co-founder of Archer Aviation (2018, NYSE-listed via SPAC in 2021); founder of Cover (October 2023); founder of Figure AI (May 2022); founder of Hark (2025).
• Recognition: TIME 100 AI 2024 listee; estimated net worth approximately $19 billion as of February 2026 per Forbes and New York Times reporting.
• X / Twitter: @adcock_brett
• LinkedIn: brettadcock
• Personal site: brettadcock.com
• Wikipedia: Brett Adcock

Origins

Adcock was raised on his family's third-generation farm outside Moweaqua, Illinois. He graduated as valedictorian of Central A&M High School and entered the University of Florida, initially in industrial engineering before transferring to business administration, completing a Bachelor of Science in 2008.

He started building web companies at sixteen, including an e-commerce site for outdoor electronics and a financial-content site called Street of Walls. The early entrepreneurial pattern, of starting capital-light ventures while still in school, set the template for the multi-company portfolio that followed.

Career

Adcock's professional career organizes around four sequential operating roles, each at increasing capital intensity and technical scope.

He co-founded Vettery in 2013, an AI-augmented recruiting marketplace based in New York that matched job candidates with technology employers using machine-learning ranking. Vettery was sold to The Adecco Group for approximately $100 million in 2018, providing Adcock's first liquidity event and the financial base for subsequent ventures.

In October 2018 he co-founded Archer Aviation, the electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft company headquartered in Palo Alto. Archer listed on the New York Stock Exchange through a SPAC merger in February 2021 and pursued the urban air mobility category alongside Joby Aviation and other eVTOL contemporaries. Adcock departed the operating role at Archer to pursue robotics.

In May 2022 he founded Figure AI in Sunnyvale, California, the general-purpose humanoid-robotics company that became his most consequential venture. Adcock assembled Figure's founding research team from Boston Dynamics, Tesla AI, Google DeepMind, and Apple, and the company progressed from prototype humanoid hardware to commercial deployments with BMW and other industrial customers across 2024 and 2025. Figure's reported $39.5 billion valuation as of February 2025 placed Adcock among the wealthiest founders in robotics. The Helix vision-language-action model and the Figure 02 platform anchor the company's product line as of 2026.

In October 2023, Adcock founded Cover, an AI security company developing detection systems intended to address school shootings using technology licensed from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Cover operates as a separate entity from Figure and Hark and has remained comparatively quiet on public disclosure.

In 2025 Adcock founded Hark, the personal-intelligence AI lab he seeded with $100 million of his own capital. Hark unveiled publicly on March 24, 2026 after approximately eight months in stealth, with a stated mission of building "a futuristic interface to artificial intelligence" through integrated multimodal models, hardware devices, and software. The team of roughly 45 includes recruits from Apple, Meta AI / FAIR, Google, Tesla AI, and Amazon. Adcock has stated that Hark and Figure AI will not merge despite shared campus and infrastructure, and he continues as chief executive of both companies in parallel.

Affiliations

• Vettery: Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, 2013 to 2018 (acquired by Adecco).
• Archer Aviation: Co-founder, 2018 to 2022.
• Figure AI: Founder and Chief Executive Officer, May 2022 to present.
• Cover: Founder, October 2023 to present.
• Hark: Founder and Chief Executive Officer, 2025 to present.

Notable contributions

Adcock's published record runs through four operating ventures across roughly thirteen years, with sequential moves from recruiting software to aviation to humanoid robotics to consumer AI.

• Vettery (2013 to 2018). Co-founded the AI-augmented recruiting marketplace; exit to Adecco for approximately $100 million.
• Archer Aviation (October 2018). Co-founded the eVTOL aircraft company; NYSE listing via SPAC, February 2021.
• Figure AI (May 2022). Founded the humanoid-robotics company; reported $39.5 billion valuation as of February 2025; Helix vision-language-action model and Figure 02 industrial humanoid as flagship outputs.
• Cover (October 2023). Founded the AI security company.
• Hark (2025). Founded the personal-intelligence AI lab; $100 million self-funded seed; public unveiling March 24, 2026.
• Recognition. TIME 100 AI 2024; approximately $19 billion estimated net worth per February 2026 Forbes and New York Times reporting.

Investments and boards

• Figure AI (humanoid robotics): Founder and Chief Executive Officer, May 2022 to present. Privately held; reported $39.5 billion valuation as of February 2025.
• Hark (consumer AI): Founder and Chief Executive Officer, 2025 to present. Self-funded with $100 million personal investment.
• Cover (AI security): Founder, October 2023 to present.

The cross-company arrangement between Hark and Figure AI is structurally unusual: the two companies share a physical campus and compute infrastructure, and Hark has access to Figure-derived embodied training data, but they operate as separate corporate entities with no announced equity overlap. The dual chief-executive role is rare among founder-operators at billion-dollar-class technology companies.

Network

Adcock's longest-running professional relationships date to the Vettery and Archer founding teams. Figure AI's founding research-and-engineering bench includes recruits from Boston Dynamics, Tesla AI, Google DeepMind, and Apple. The Hark hires, including Director of Design Abidur Chowdhury (formerly of Apple's iPhone industrial-design team), draw from a similar pool with additional recruits from Meta AI / FAIR, Google, and Amazon. Adcock has been comparatively quiet on personal-investment activity in AI outside the founder-and-operator roles, with Hark structured as self-funded and Figure carrying outside investors led by Microsoft, NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos, and Parkway Venture Capital across its prior rounds.

Position in the field

As of May 2026, Adcock occupies a structurally distinctive position in the AI lab cohort: a serial founder simultaneously leading a frontier humanoid-robotics company and a personal-AI consumer lab, with the AI lab self-funded rather than venture-backed. The closest peer comparisons in the founder-operator cohort are Elon Musk, who runs multiple operating companies in parallel, and Sam Altman at OpenAI, whose disclosed personal investment portfolio runs alongside the chief-executive role. Adcock differs from both in that the Hark capitalization is exclusively from his own resources, with no outside venture capital disclosed as of April 2026.

The reported approximately $19 billion estimated net worth places him among the wealthiest founders in robotics. Industry coverage of his trajectory frames Figure AI's commercial deployments and Hark's product roadmap as the two principal questions for 2026 and 2027.

Outlook

Open questions over the next 6 to 18 months:

• Hark first model release. Targeted for summer 2026. Capability profile and how it benchmarks against frontier-tier comparators.
• Hark hardware device. Form factor, launch timing, and pricing.
• Hark outside capital. Whether the lab accepts venture or strategic investment, and at what valuation.
• Figure AI commercial scale. Pace of industrial humanoid deployments and the Helix model evolution.
• Cross-company arrangement. Durability and structure of the Hark and Figure AI shared infrastructure and embodied-data relationship.
• Adcock bandwidth. Time and decision-making allocation across the simultaneous Hark, Figure AI, and Cover operating roles.

Sources

• Brett Adcock. Wikipedia biographical entry covering education, Vettery, Archer Aviation, Figure AI, Cover, and Hark.
• Brett Adcock Bio. Personal-site biography with founding-date references for each venture.
• Hark Launches AI Lab Building Futuristic Interface to Artificial Intelligence. Hark's public unveiling, March 24, 2026.
• The Information: Figure CEO Brett Adcock Launches New AI Lab With $100 Million in Funding. Initial reporting on the $100 million Hark personal-funding structure.
• Brett Adcock LinkedIn profile. Career and current-role reference.
• The Man Who Wants to Write the Operating System for Physical Work. Long-form Adcock profile across the multi-company portfolio.