Conway Research is building Underdog, a personal AI product intended to run on devices people own, including offline. Andreessen Horowitz says it is leading the company’s first funding round, though the announcement gives no amount.
Watch Desk analysis
What happened
Underdog is presented as an assistant that can help with decisions and reclaim time while keeping data on users’ devices. Conway founder Sigil Wen’s earlier work included getting GPT-2 running on an Apple Watch and helping bring Whisper to the iPhone at Airchat. The announcement describes those projects as part of his path towards local personal AI.
Andreessen Horowitz says the product is Conway Research’s first and that the company plans to improve its models and bring them to more consumer devices. Read the announcement.
Why it matters
Personal assistants become more useful when they can draw on conversations, documents and preferences. Keeping that information on a person’s own devices, and making the assistant work offline, is a different proposition from sending everything to a cloud service. It is also a promise, not a demonstrated privacy guarantee: the announcement does not explain Underdog’s technical architecture or what data it accesses.
Our read
The interesting bet is not simply “AI, but on your phone”. It is that a useful assistant can know enough to help without asking users to hand their personal lives to a remote service. That is a worthwhile problem to tackle. The test will be whether Underdog delivers practical help across devices while making its privacy claims clear enough to inspect, rather than asking us to take them on trust.
What to watch
- Which devices Underdog supports at launch, and when it will be available.
- What tasks it can perform locally and what happens when it needs more computing power.
- How Conway explains its data handling, model updates and privacy protections.
Discussion spark: Would you trust a personal AI more if it ran on your own devices, or would you need independent proof of its privacy protections before giving it access to your information?
Sources and evidence
- Investing in Conway, the Creator of Underdog – Andreessen Horowitz (2 October 2026, 16:55 UTC)
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