a16z leads Conway Research's first round for Underdog, a private AI agent that runs on your Mac
Andreessen Horowitz led Conway Research's first funding round for Underdog, a private, agentic AI assistant that runs entirely on your Mac or iPhone with no data sent to the cloud.
What happened
Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) led Conway Research's first funding round, announced October 2, 2026 by founder Sigil Wen. Khosla Ventures, Hummingbird VC and other investors also participated. The round size and valuation were not disclosed.
Underdog's pitch: free, capable, private
Underdog is Conway's first product: a personal AI assistant pitched as capable, free, and private. It runs fully on personal devices — Macs and iPhones — with no data sent to external servers, and it can work offline. The assistant has agentic capabilities: it can take actions on the user's behalf, not just chat.
Founder Sigil Wen is a 2025 Thiel Fellow who previously co-created Airchat alongside Naval Ravikant, got GPT-2 running on his Apple Watch, and helped bring Whisper to the iPhone at Airchat.
The models: Woof and Underdog 27B
Conway's model lineup includes "Woof," a 4-billion-parameter model that takes up less than 2.5 GB, and "Underdog 27B." According to Conway, the larger model is designed to outperform frontier models such as Claude Opus 4.6 — the company says it reportedly beats it on certain benchmarks while running on consumer hardware.
The engine: up to 730 tokens/sec on a MacBook
Under the hood, Conway says it built custom inference engines tuned for Apple Silicon that run up to 4.5 times faster than Apple's MLX framework, reaching up to 730 tokens per second on MacBooks. That 730 tokens/sec figure comes from an Apple M5 Max benchmark on a function-edit task — not an across-the-board performance number.
Why it matters
Unlike OpenAI's Dots, which runs always-on agents on cloud computers, Underdog keeps everything on the user's own device — a local-first alternative in the personal AI agent race.
Caveats
Round terms were not disclosed, and the speed and benchmark claims are the company's own figures, not independently verified.
Verified October 2, 2026.
Sources
Sources
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