Conway Research, founded by Sigil Wen in 2026, has secured investment from Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, and Hummingbird VC. The funding will support the development of Underdog, an AI assistant designed to operate locally on Apple devices without cloud connectivity.
The product lineup includes the Woof model, which features 4 billion parameters and requires less than 2.5 GB of storage. The larger Underdog 27B model is designed to outperform Claude Opus 4.6 on specific benchmarks while running entirely on consumer hardware.
The company developed custom inference engines optimized for Apple Silicon. These engines reportedly operate up to 4.5 times faster than the Apple MLX framework, achieving speeds of up to 730 tokens per second on MacBook devices.
The assistant is built with agentic capabilities to perform tasks on behalf of users. By processing data locally, the system avoids uploading sensitive information, such as emails or audio transcripts, to external servers.
