Brett Adcock Companies: Every Business He Founded

Quick answer

Brett Adcock has founded five companies: Vettery (2012 — hiring marketplace, sold to Adecco for $110 million in 2018), Archer Aviation (2018 — electric air taxis, public via SPAC in 2021), Figure AI (2022 — humanoid robots, valued at $39 billion in 2025), Cover (2023 — school security, $30 million self-funded), and Hark (2025 — AI devices, valued above $6 billion in 2026). He is currently CEO of both Figure AI and Hark simultaneously — an almost unheard-of dual role at this scale.

Two of the five are multi-billion-dollar companies; one is public; one was sold; one is a mission-driven side project. Together they explain his $23.4 billion net worth — and a founder operating style unlike anyone else in tech.

1. Figure AI — the $39 billion crown jewel (2022)

Figure AI is the company that made Adcock a centi-billionaire-in-waiting. Founded in 2022 in the San Jose area, it builds autonomous humanoid robots powered by its in-house Helix vision-language-action AI model. Adcock is founder and CEO, and Forbes estimates he owns roughly 50% — worth about $19.5 billion at the last valuation.

The funding arc is one of the steepest in venture history: $675 million at $2.6 billion in February 2024 (Series B, with OpenAI and Microsoft's Satya Nadella participating), then more than $1 billion at $39 billion in September 2025 (Series C, led by Parkway Venture Capital with Nvidia, Intel Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Salesforce, LG Technology Ventures, and T-Mobile Ventures). Total raised: over $1.9 billion.

The commercial proof: Figure 02 robots worked at BMW's Spartanburg plant for roughly ten months — 1,250 operating hours, 90,000+ parts handled, 30,000+ BMW X3 vehicles assembled — and in July 2026 BMW began deploying the Figure 03 successor for logistics. Manufacturing happens at the BotQ factory, which hit one robot per hour by April 2026 and targets 12,000 units a year. The company is aiming for $9 billion in revenue by 2029.

2. Hark — the $6 billion second act (2025)

In 2025, while still running Figure, Adcock founded Hark, an AI lab building personalized AI devices: its own foundation models, software stack, and custom hardware, pitched as a universal interface that "actually knows you." He seeded it with $100 million of his own money and hired 45 engineers from Apple, Google, and Meta — reportedly including the lead designer behind the iPhone Air.

Then he raised over $700 million at a valuation above $6 billion in 2026, led by Parkway Venture Capital with Nvidia, AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and ARK Invest. Running Figure (AI bodies) and Hark (AI brains) at once, Adcock controls two of the most valuable private AI companies in the world. He has said Hark's models would ship within months of its 2026 unveiling, with hardware to follow.

3. Archer Aviation — the flying-taxi bet (2018)

Adcock co-founded Archer Aviation in 2018 with Adam Goldstein to build battery-powered electric vertical take-off aircraft — air taxis targeting speeds up to 150 miles an hour. It was a far harder problem than his hiring marketplace: aviation means certification, regulation, and billions in capital. Adcock's answer was the 2021 SPAC boom: Archer went public via a SPAC merger in 2021, listing on the NYSE as ACHR.

He has since handed day-to-day leadership to others to focus on Figure, but Forbes still counts Archer shares among his assets. The Archer years were effectively his apprenticeship in raising and spending billions on hardware — the exact skill Figure AI now demands at 10x the scale. It was also his education in regulated, capital-intensive industries: lessons in certification timelines, manufacturing discipline, and investor patience that transfer directly to building humanoid robots at factory scale.

4. Vettery — the $110 million first exit (2012)

Every empire needs a first win. Vettery, the hiring marketplace Adcock co-founded in 2012, inverted recruiting: employers applied to candidates instead of the reverse. In 2018, Switzerland's Adecco Group acquired it for $110 million — Adcock's first nine-figure outcome and the seed capital, reputationally and financially, for everything after. Six years from founding to exit, in software, with a clean result: the track record that let him raise for airplanes and robots on reputation alone. The Vettery playbook — spot an inefficient market, build the marketplace, sell to the incumbent — would echo in every later venture, just with bigger machines and far bigger checks. Small software wins compound into hardware empires.

5. Cover — the quiet mission project (2023)

Cover, founded in 2023, is the outlier: a school-security company built on technology with NASA/JPL roots, which Adcock self-funded with $30 million of his own money. It generates no headlines and no billion-dollar valuation — it reads as a mission project from a founder who grew up in small-town Illinois and now deploys his wealth toward problems he cares about. Financially immaterial next to Figure and Hark; personally revealing. It also completes the picture of a founder who treats his own capital as the first investor in every idea: Vettery proved he could build, Archer proved he could raise billions for hardware, and Cover and Hark prove he still bets his own money before asking anyone else's.

The full portfolio at a glance

The pattern across all five: Adcock founds, holds enormous equity, self-funds the earliest stage, and scales ambition each time — from a $110 million software exit to a $39 billion robotics company. For how each company built his fortune step by step, and what he actually gets paid as a dual CEO, those stories run in parallel.

The dual-CEO experiment

Running two companies at once is usually a red flag in Silicon Valley — investors want monogamous founders. Adcock's answer is that Figure and Hark are two halves of one thesis: bodies and brains. Figure builds the humanoid hardware; Hark builds the personal AI that could one day animate it. Whether the dual-CEO model sustains at this scale is an open question, but with a combined private valuation above $45 billion across the two, the market is — for now — letting him try. And the portfolio keeps a clear hierarchy: Figure is the fortune, Hark is the second act, Archer is the apprenticeship, Vettery was the grubstake, and Cover is the conscience.

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