Conway Research raised funding from a16z, Khosla Ventures and Hummingbird VC. It builds Underdog, a private AI assistant running fully on Macs and iPhones. No data is sent to external servers. Founder Sigil Wen announced the backing on October 2, 2026. The round size was not disclosed. Underdog includes Woof, a 4B-parameter model under 2.5GB. A larger 27B model is said to outperform Claude Opus 4.6 on some benchmarks. Conway built custom inference engines for Apple Silicon. These run up to 4.5 times faster than Apple’s MLX framework. The assistant can act on a user’s behalf. Wen was a 2025 Thiel Fellow and co-created Airchat with Naval Ravikant. On-device AI avoids cloud privacy risks by keeping data local. Compute costs shift to user hardware, enabling a free offering.
What changed
Cloud-based AI assistants required external servers for processing.
What it unlocks
Running a private AI assistant entirely on personal devices without sending data externally.
- 4.5x faster than Apple MLX
- 730 tokens per second on MacBooks
- 4B-parameter Woof model <2.5GB
- 27B-parameter Underdog model
What you need to act on it
- Apple Silicon hardware
Sources