Conway Research has opened an invite-only beta of Underdog, a personal assistant whose model runs on the computer in front of you. TechCrunch, writing on October 6, 2026, says founder Sigil Wen launched that beta on Monday. The piece says the model runs wholly on-device, so a user’s data stays on machines they already own: Macs and Windows PCs now, with Linux, iPhone, and Android versions coming soon.
Andreessen Horowitz posted on October 2 that it is leading Conway’s first round. Chris Dixon, Gabriel Vasquez, and Elizabeth Harkavy wrote the note. It does not name an amount. They describe Underdog as personal intelligence on devices you own, including while those devices are offline.
When it opened, and where it runs
TechCrunch’s Monday is the dated news story. On TBPN’s October 5 digest, Wen says the invite-only beta opened on Friday. He also describes support for Apple products, Windows on Nvidia hardware, Linux, Android, and an iOS app he calls imminent. The two platform lists do not match. For what a person can install today, TechCrunch is the narrower account: Mac and Windows, with Linux and phones still ahead.
What the privacy lines actually name
TechCrunch’s on-device claim is about where the model runs. The concrete control it names is encryption of the keys to email and other accounts a person authorizes. Andreessen Horowitz traces Wen’s motive to a bug, years ago, that exposed private mail in a popular email app, and to earlier work getting GPT-2 onto an Apple Watch. That is origin, not a feature list for this beta.
Wen built an inference engine called Husky. He told TechCrunch it moves less data between the main chip and the graphics chip than other on-device engines. On TBPN he also called Husky 445 times faster. The digest does not say faster than what, so the multiple has no baseline on the page.
The 27B model, in his words
TechCrunch says Underdog uses a 27-billion-parameter reasoning model fine-tuned from Qwen3.8-27B, smaller than the models hosted in data centers. Wen argues that it compares favorably with Claude Opus 4.6 in some benchmarks, which he calls top performance from six months ago. His sentence to TechCrunch: “You don’t need to sacrifice your privacy for the capability because they’re just as capable.” Tasks he names are shopping research and math homework.
On TBPN he goes further. The digest says a 27B model post-trained with reinforcement learning on Qwen’s 27B base scores above Claude Opus 4.6 Max on Artificial Analysis, and it quotes him: Underdog 27B “scores better than Claude Opus 4.6 max.” No page in this set shows an independent table, a model card, or a link to that board. Both comparisons are Wen’s.
Free of ads, paid when the agent buys
TechCrunch says the app will be free at first and never ad-supported. Wen’s reason for skipping a subscription is cost: the model runs on the user’s machine, so Conway is not paying a provider for inference. “I don’t have to charge you a subscription to run this because my costs are so super low,” he said. Planned revenue is a tiny percentage of payment transactions the assistant makes on Stripe’s rails, “something like an interchange fee.” No rate is printed. TBPN’s picture of the same plan: the agent shops, for example for a flight, generates a unique card, and takes a cut.
Patrick Collison, Stripe’s co-founder, is an angel in TechCrunch’s account, one name on a longer list. TBPN calls him the company’s biggest angel.
The round, and the headline comparison
Andreessen Horowitz says it leads the first round and leaves the size unstated. TechCrunch adds Khosla Ventures, Hummingbird, SV Angel, and the Anthology Fund, the partnership fund between Menlo Ventures and Anthropic. Angels named there include Vercel founder Guillermo Rauch, Noam Brown, and Deedy Das, along with Collison.
The TechCrunch headline calls Underdog the most private Instinct and Muse competitor yet. The article does not describe those products. What it does argue is that other assistants’ policies can allow collection for advertising, sale, or training, while an assistant may need medical, financial, and family details to be useful. Underdog’s substitute, in that telling, is the cut of a purchase.
Someone with an invite can check the installer against TechCrunch’s Mac and Windows beta before connecting an account. Linux, iPhone, and Android are “coming soon” there, and already in Wen’s TBPN description. The Stripe cut has no published rate. The Claude Opus comparison is his, on both outlets.
The Campfire
No commentsNobody has pulled up a log by this one yet. Be the first to say what you make of it.
Held for the desk. It appears after a look.