00s Founder Raises from a16z for Underdog, a Local-First AI Assistant Running a 27B Model on Your Laptop
创业邦 · wechat · 2026-10-20
Conway Research: putting AI assistants on the user's own computer
Conway Research, founded by Gen-Z Chinese-Canadian founder Sigil Wen, raised a round led by a16z with Khosla Ventures, Hummingbird, and SV Angel participating; angel investors include Stripe's Patrick Collison, Vercel's Guillermo Rauch, and OpenAI's Noam Brown. The amount is undisclosed.
Founder background
Sigil Wen moved to San Francisco alone at 17, lived in a hacker house for nearly a year, worked on Naval's Airchat, and won a 2025 Thiel Fellowship. He got early access to Claude and Midjourney prototypes, and deployed GPT-2 on Apple Watch back in 2023. A past email-app security leak that exposed his private mail drove his focus on data ownership for personal AI. His essay "Web 4.0" drew 10M views in 48 hours.
Product and tech stack
- Underdog: local-first, privacy-focused personal AI assistant, invite-only beta on Mac/Windows, free with no ads
- Underdog 27B: post-trained from Qwen3.8-27B, retains tool-calling and is quantized for local hardware
- Woof: a 4B lightweight model (2.4GB weights)
- Husky inference engine: optimized for Apple Silicon, up to 4.5x faster than MLX in their benchmarks
- Business model: instead of subscriptions, take a cut of transactions the AI completes on the user's behalf via Stripe
Competitive landscape
While Meta (Muse, 8M+ downloads in its first month) and OpenAI (Dots) race to own the cloud-based personal AI entry point, Conway bets the opposite: run inference on-device and give data control back to users. The company's "Underdog's Law": frontier AI capabilities reach personal devices roughly six months later.
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