Sigil Wen Launches On-Device Private AI Underdog with Backing from a16z and AI Leaders

ChainCatcher report: Sigil Wen, founder of Conway Research, has announced the launch of Underdog, a private personal AI that runs on users’ existing devices. Sigil Wen stated that Underdog has received support from a16z, Khosla Ventures, Hummingbird VC, Anthology (Anthropic and Menlo Ventures), as well as prominent figures in the AI field including Patrick Collison, Naval, Guillermo Rauch, Noam Brown, Thomas Wolf, and Logan Kilpatrick. According to the announcement, Underdog’s mission is to provide billions of people with free, accessible, reliable, and private AI. The team has introduced Underdog’s Law: cutting-edge intelligence will reach users’ devices within six months. The project will begin with high-speed AI capable of running on consumer-grade hardware, advancing capability, speed, power efficiency, and data efficiency through co-designed models and inference engines. The announcement also notes that Underdog’s research spans agent economics, confidential reasoning, and how AI is reshaping the internet economy, asserting that privacy and capability no longer need to be traded off against each other.