Conway Research launches on-device AI assistant Underdog with backing from a16z and Anthropic consortium

On October 19, U.S. AI agent startup Conway Research unveiled Underdog, its first personal AI assistant, now in invite-only testing. The product runs entirely on users' devices and works offline. The company also announced investment from Anthology, an investment consortium formed by Anthropic and Menlo Ventures, as well as Silicon Valley venture firm a16z and individuals and institutions from Google, OpenAI, and Hugging Face.

Founded in February 2026, Conway Research focuses on AI agent frameworks that can operate autonomously. Underdog is designed to help with daily work and life tasks, with data stored locally. It can connect to users' email and calendar to handle tasks such as reading emails, scheduling, meeting records, and voice input. Subsequent features include local image generation and editing, an on-device agent payment feature launched with Stripe, and one-click import of meeting notes.

According to official details, Underdog is powered by Woof 4B and Saluki 27B models. Saluki 27B is based on Qwen3.8 27B, with weights about one-seventh the size of the full-precision version while retaining 96% performance. The company also built a dedicated inference engine, Husky, to improve on-device efficiency. On a MacBook with Husky Flash enabled, Woof 4B can process up to 730 tokens per second, which the company says is 4.5 times faster than Apple's open-source machine learning framework MLX.

Underdog currently supports Mac and Windows, with Linux, iOS, and Android versions planned.