Underdog's On-Device Pivot Signals M&A Positioning
AI-generated image · Bay Street Wire
Sigil Wen's launch of a privacy-centric AI assistant leverages low-overhead infrastructure to attract hardware suitors.
Sigil Wen has launched an invite-only beta of Underdog, an AI assistant designed to run entirely on-device for Mac and Windows PC users, as TechCrunch first reported. Developed by Conway Research, the tool utilizes Husky, a proprietary inference engine built to minimize data movement between a computer's main chip and its graphics chip.
While Wen frames the move as a privacy initiative—noting that user data remains on personal hardware—the technical architecture positions the company as a high-value target for hardware manufacturers seeking to reduce cloud-dependency. By utilizing a 27-billion parameter reasoning model fine-tuned from Qwen3.8 27B, Underdog avoids the massive inference costs associated with data-center-hosted models. This allows Wen to offer the app for free without ad support, instead generating revenue through a small percentage of payment transactions processed via Stripe's secure rails.
Conway Research is backed by a roster of prominent venture firms and individuals, including Andreessen Horowitz (via partner Chris Dixon), Khosla Ventures, Hummingbird, SV Angel, and the Anthology Fund (a partnership between Menlo Ventures and Anthropic). The company's angel backers include Deedy Das, Noam Brown, Vercel founder Guillermo Rauch, and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison.
Wen, a Thiel Fellow who previously worked for Naval Ravikant at Airchat, claims the model's performance is comparable to Claude Opus 4.6 in certain benchmarks. The company plans to expand Underdog to Linux, iPhone, and Android platforms.