Conway Research lands a16z backing for Underdog, a private AI that never leaves your device

Most AI assistants work like a very smart pen pal. You write, your words travel to a distant server, and an answer comes back. Conway Research wants to cancel the mail service entirely. The AI lab, founded by Sigil Wen in 2026, has secured backing from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Khosla Ventures, Hummingbird VC and other investors to build Underdog. It is a private assistant designed to run fully on personal hardware like Macs and iPhones, with no data sent to external servers. Wen announced the funding on October 2, 2026. The size of the round was not part of the announcement. What Underdog actually does Underdog is Conway Research’s first product. Its pitch is simple: an AI assistant that is capable, free and private, all at once. Conway’s answer is a lineup of models built to live on consumer devices. The smallest headliner is Woof, a model with 4 billion parameters that takes up less than 2.5 GB. Then there is the bigger sibling, Underdog 27B. Conway says it is designed to outperform frontier models such as Claude Opus 4.6, and it is reported to beat that model on certain benchmarks while running on consumer hardware. The engine under the hood Conway built custom inference engi...