Hark's New AI Agent Can Shop, Book and Browse for You, No App Needed
A startup that raised $700 million in its first funding round has launched a browser agent that claims to handle real-world tasks faster and cheaper than rivals from OpenAI and Anthropic.
Key points
- Hark, a startup, raised $700 million in Series A funding in May 2025.
- Its new agent, Hark Handoff, can browse websites and complete tasks such as shopping, booking restaurants and researching topics on a user's behalf.
- Hark claims Handoff works on sites with no official API, a technical shortcut that lets software communicate, including Target, Walmart, OpenTable and LinkedIn.
- The company says Handoff is faster and cheaper than competing agents tied to OpenAI's GPT 5.5 and Anthropic's Opus 4.8 models.
- Hark has opened a waitlist and plans a full release before the end of summer 2025.
Imagine telling your phone to order a bouquet, book a dinner table and check flights, then walking away while it gets it done. That is the pitch behind Hark Handoff, a browser agent, meaning software that controls a web browser the same way a human would, clicking buttons and typing text, to complete tasks from start to finish.
Hark launched Handoff this week after raising $700 million in Series A funding, the first major outside investment a startup takes, back in May. The figure is enormous for a single funding round and signals serious investor confidence in the browser-agent space.
What can it actually do?
Handoff can shop, book, research and file on your behalf. In a demo shown by CEO Brett Adcock, the agent accepted an instruction to build a flower bouquet, including a loose instruction like "some of the florist's choice," and began working through the website to fulfil it.
The list of supported sites includes Target, Walmart, OpenTable and LinkedIn. Crucially, those sites have no official API, the kind of digital doorway that normally lets two pieces of software talk to each other cleanly. Handoff gets around that by reading the page visually, the same way you would, and deciding whether to click a button or type something.
The demo video shows only part of the process, though. A full end-to-end test in the wild would tell us a lot more about how reliable it really is.
How is it different from other browser agents?
Plenty of companies are chasing the same idea. Google, OpenAI and Anthropic all have computer-use agents, software that can control a screen. Funded startups like Browser Use, Polar, Strawberry and Aside are working on similar browser tools.
Hark's claimed edge is speed and cost. The company says Handoff is faster and cheaper than agents built on GPT 5.5 (OpenAI's model) and Opus 4.8 (Anthropic's model). Those are bold claims, and independent benchmarks would need to confirm them.
On the technical side, Hark says its model predicts the next action, such as which button to click or which field to fill, rather than predicting the next word the way most large language models, the AI technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude, do. The company is currently using a post-trained model, meaning one fine-tuned from an existing base, and plans to train its own from scratch later in 2025.
What does this mean for ordinary users?
Right now, nothing immediate. Hark has opened a waitlist, and access is not yet public. If the agent works as advertised, people who dislike repetitive online tasks, comparing prices, refilling prescriptions, booking tables, could hand those jobs off entirely.
The risk worth watching is access to accounts. Any agent doing tasks on your behalf will need login credentials for the sites it visits. Before signing up for any browser-agent service, it is worth reading exactly what data it stores and how it is protected.
First reported by TechCrunch AI, Hark says the full platform is coming before summer ends.
