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 tied to OpenAI and Anthropic models.
Key points
- Hark raised $700 million in Series A funding in May 2025.
- Its new agent, Hark Handoff, browses websites and completes tasks like shopping, booking restaurants and researching topics on a user's behalf.
- Hark claims Handoff works on sites with no official API, including Target, Walmart, OpenTable and LinkedIn.
- The company says Handoff is faster and cheaper than agents built on OpenAI's GPT 5.5 and Anthropic's Opus 4.8.
- Hark has opened a waitlist and plans a full release before the end of summer 2025.
Tell your phone to order a bouquet, book a dinner table and check flights, then walk away while it gets it done. That's the pitch behind Hark Handoff, a browser agent: software that controls a web browser the way a person would, reading pages, clicking buttons and filling in fields, to finish 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. For a single round, that figure is extraordinary, and it reflects how seriously investors are betting on browser automation right now.
What can it actually do?
Handoff handles shopping, booking and research on your behalf. In a demo, CEO Brett Adcock showed the agent accepting a command to build a flower bouquet, including vague phrasing like "some of the florist's choice," and working through the site to fulfil it.
Supported sites include Target, Walmart, OpenTable and LinkedIn, none of which offer an official API, the kind of digital doorway that normally lets two pieces of software exchange data cleanly. Handoff gets around that by reading each page visually and deciding what to click or type, the same way you would. The demo shows only part of the process, so how well it holds up in live use is still an open question.
How is it different from other browser agents?
Google, OpenAI and Anthropic all have computer-use agents, software that can control a screen. VC-funded browser startups Browser Use, Polar, Strawberry and Aside are chasing the same idea. Hark's claimed edge is speed and cost: it says Handoff is faster and cheaper than agents built on GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.8. Those are bold claims that independent benchmarks haven't yet confirmed.
On the technical side, Hark's model predicts the next action, whether a click or a keystroke in a specific field, rather than predicting the next word the way most large language models (the AI behind chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude) do. For this release, Hark is using a post-trained model, one refined from an existing base, and plans to train its own from scratch later in 2025.
For context on where browser automation fits among this year's AI funding wave, our story on Prentis, the desk-job AI that raised $1 billion shows how different teams are attacking the same underlying problem from different angles.
What does this mean for ordinary users?
Nothing immediately: the waitlist is open but public access isn't. If Handoff works as advertised, people who spend time on repetitive online tasks could hand them off entirely.
The real thing to watch isn't the speed benchmarks. It's account access. Any agent acting on your behalf will need login credentials for every site it visits, and before you hand those over, you'll want to read exactly what gets stored and how it's secured. That question applies to every browser agent on the market, not just this one.
First reported by TechCrunch AI, Hark says the full platform is coming before summer ends.
