a16z backs 20-something founder's Conway, betting on local-first AI assistant Underdog
快鲤鱼 · wechat · 2026-10-21
Conway Research, founded by Gen-Z Chinese-Canadian entrepreneur Sigil Wen, raised a round led by a16z with Khosla Ventures, Patrick Collison and Noam Brown participating (amount undisclosed).
Its product Underdog runs an AI assistant locally on Mac/Windows to keep sensitive data off the cloud, currently in invite-only beta, free with no ads. Instead of subscriptions, Conway plans to monetize via a Stripe-based cut of transactions the assistant completes. The company built a full stack: Underdog 27B (post-trained from Qwen3.8-27B), the 4B Woof model (2.4GB), and the Husky inference engine for Apple Silicon, claiming up to 4.5x MLX throughput. Wen, a Thiel Fellow whose 'Web 4.0' essay drew 10M views in 48 hours, is betting the personal-AI entry point can belong to users rather than cloud vendors.
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