8-month-old Conway launches fully local AI assistant Underdog, backed by a16z and AI heavyweights
智东西 · wechat · 2026-10-19
Conway Research, an 8-month-old US startup founded by college dropout Sigil Wen, unveiled Underdog, a personal AI assistant that runs entirely on-device and works offline—positioning itself as the most privacy-focused rival to Meta's Muse. Backers include a16z, the Anthropic/Menlo Anthology fund, plus individuals like Patrick Collison, Noam Brown, and Thom Wolf.
- Handles email, calendars, meeting notes, local image generation (built on Qwen-Image models), iMessage, and an on-device agent payment flow with Stripe using one-time Link cards.
- Open-source Saluki 27B is fine-tuned from Qwen3 827B at 1/7 the weight size with 96% of performance; a lighter Woof 4B hits 730 tokens/s on MacBook via the in-house Husky engine, 4.5x faster than Apple's MLX.
- Business model: free, no ads, no user data collection—revenue comes from a small cut of Stripe-processed agent transactions.
Still in invite-only testing, and its capability trails Muse and Dot, but the project shows local-first agents are viable.
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