Sigil Wen launched an invite-only beta of Underdog on Monday. Underdog is a privacy-focused AI assistant that runs wholly on-device. The application currently works on Macs and Windows PCs. Linux, iPhone, and Android versions are coming soon.
Wen is a 19-year-old Thiel Fellow and self-taught coder. When he was 17, he moved to Silicon Valley and lived in an AI hacker house with Andrej Karpathy. He later coded for Naval Ravikant on Airchat. Now, his startup Conway Research builds Underdog.
Husky engine runs AI models on user hardware
Underdog runs on Husky, an inference engine built by Wen to run AI models quickly on user hardware. The system moves less data between a computer main chip and graphics chip than rival engines. It also encrypts the keys to authorized email and other accounts.
The app currently uses a 27-billion parameter reasoning model fine-tuned from Qwen3.8-27B. Wen argues that this model compares favorably with Claude Opus 4.6 in some benchmarks. He states it can handle everyday tasks like shopping research and math homework.
Read nextTikTok launches an AI shopping assistant and one-click checkoutUnderdog takes a percentage of payment transactions
Underdog is free at first and will never be ad-supported. Conway Research avoids giant inference overhead by running AI directly on user hardware. Instead of charging a subscription, Underdog will take a tiny percentage of payment transactions made using Stripe secure payment rails.
Conway Research is backed by Andreessen Horowitz via Chris Dixon, Khosla Ventures, Hummingbird, SV Angel, and the Anthology Fund. Angel investors include Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison, Vercel founder Guillermo Rauch, Noam Brown, and Deedy Das.
Wen plans to expand platform support to Linux, iOS, and Android devices following the initial Mac and Windows beta launch.
