Hark Launches Handoff, Browser Agent for Automating Web-Based Tasks

Hark, a startup that raised $700 million in Series A funding in May, unveiled Hark Handoff, an AI agent capable of efficiently navigating websites without official APIs to complete tasks. The agent can perform functions like ordering food or coffee, booking travel, shopping, making restaurant reservations, and conducting web research by understanding website structure and visual data to determine when to click buttons or type information. In a product demonstration, CEO Brett Adcock showed the agent completing a flower arrangement order with fuzzy customer specifications. Hark is using a post-trained model for this release with plans to pre-train later this year. Unlike large language models that predict the next token, Hark's model predicts the next action, whether a click or keyboard input at specific locations. The startup claims Handoff is faster and significantly less expensive than competing models like GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.8. The company has opened a waitlist for the platform and plans to release it by end of summer. Multiple companies including Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic are developing computer-use agents, with VC-backed startups like Browser Use, Polar, Strawberry, and Aside working on browser-based automation.