One of Apple's iPhone Air designers, Abidur Chowdhury, left to become the head of design at a new AI startup called Hawk.
Chowdhury left Apple in November 2025 and it was reported then that he was moving to an AI startup. Now Bloomberg has reported that the firm is Hawk, founded by Brett Adcock, who is known for the robotics company, Figure AI.
Adcock reportedly self-funded Hawk with $100 million of his own money, and says that it is intended to grow alongside Figure AI. Where the robotics firm is developing a general-purpose humanoid robot, Hawk is said to be working on AI models.
Abidur Chowdhury is to be head of design, but there are no further details about his role or Hawk's projects. The company reportedly has 30 engineers, many previously from Meta and Google, and aims to increase that to 100 in the first half of 2026.
Chowdhury's LinkedIn profile still lists him as working for Apple as a design engineer. Trained at Loughborough University in the UK, he appears to have moved to the US to join Apple in 2019.
He is known to have worked on the design of the iPhone Air, and also narrated Apple's launch video for that model.
Consequently, he did work on an important Apple device, and he did become more known than most designers in the firm. Initial reporting of his leaving Apple, though, claimed that the departure "made waves" at the company.
Without diminishing his or anyone else's contribution to Apple, this is another example of a single person's departure being exaggerated as a lethal blow to the company. As AppleInsider research shows, Apple's AI team is enormous — and also being restructured.
