Conway Research

Founder Sigil Wen says he was born in Toronto, Canada, in late 2003. A self-taught engineer, he opted out of the M&T program at the University of PennsylvaniaUniversity of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania, commonly called Penn, is a private research university and Ivy League member in Philadelphia. It traces its origins to a 1740 charity-school project; Benjamin Franklin proposed his academy in 1749, classes began in 1751, and a 1791 merger established the institution under its present name. Penn has 12 schools, with undergraduate education concentrated in arts and sciences, engineering, nursing and Wharton. Enrollment totaled 29,384 in fall 2025, and the fiscal 2025 endowment was $24.81 billion. As of October 2026, J. Larry Jameson was president, with his term scheduled to end on June 30, 2027.Open the full entry and did not go to college. At 17 he flew from Toronto to San Francisco without much of a network and for a time slept at the 44 Montgomery WeWorkWeWorkWeWork is a flexible workspace company founded in New York in 2010 by Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey. It provides private offices, coworking space, meeting rooms and enterprise workplace services. After withdrawing its IPO plan in 2019, it went public through a BowX merger in 2021, entered Chapter 11 in 2023 and emerged from restructuring in June 2024, continuing as a private company.Open the full entry.⁠[1][1][1][1][2]

He says that on August 27, 2021, David Holz showed him the first version of the Midjourney image-generation model he had trained. He then lived for 11 months in a hacker house whose residents included Andrej KarpathyAndrej KarpathyAndrej Karpathy is an AI researcher and educator, one of the founding members of OpenAI, who served as Tesla’s Director of AI and led the Autopilot computer vision team from 2017 to 2022, founded the AI education company Eureka Labs in 2024, and joined Anthropic in 2026 to work on pre-training research; at Stanford he designed and taught the university’s first deep learning course, CS231n, and he coined the term “vibe coding.”Open the full entry as well as researchers and engineers who helped create DALL·E, Whisper, GPT-3, and Stable Diffusion; on weekends he hacked with the founders of companies such as AnthropicAnthropicAnthropic is an artificial intelligence research and product company founded in 2021 that develops the Claude models, assistant, and tools such as Claude Code, and operates as a public benefit corporation. Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei are its co-founders, and its research covers model safety, interpretability, and steerability.Open the full entry, Perplexity, and Replicate, and he also coded alongside Perplexity founder Aravind Srinivas and OpenAI researcher Noam BrownNoam BrownNoam Brown is a research scientist at OpenAI who works on reasoning, reinforcement learning, self-play, and multi-agent AI. The poker programs Libratus and Pluribus, which he developed with his advisor Tuomas Sandholm, defeated top professional players; at Meta he helped develop CICERO, an AI for the game Diplomacy; and at OpenAI he was a foundational contributor to reasoning models such as o1.Open the full entry. Anthropic cofounder Ben Mann invited him to test a Slack chatbot that later became Claude.⁠[1][1][2][1][3][1]

In 2021, Naval RavikantNaval RavikantNaval Ravikant is an entrepreneur and angel investor and a co-founder of AngelList. Early on he co-founded the review site Epinions; he and Babak Nivi later grew AngelList out of the startup-fundraising blog Venture Hacks, and he co-founded the cryptocurrency hedge fund MetaStable Capital and Spearhead, which backs founders to make angel investments. His views on startups and life were compiled into the book The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.Open the full entry brought him to an event hosted by Chris Dixon, which is how he met Andreessen Horowitz. He went on to help Naval Ravikant launch the voice social app Airchat, building its invite system, recruiting most of its engineering team, and putting AI models for speech-to-text, translation, and other tasks into the product; he says Airchat was later acquired. Naval Ravikant also invited him, at 19, to become the youngest member of Spearhead, which gives founders $2 million to invest in other founders.⁠[2][2][4][4][4][5]

He says that as an angel investor he has backed more than 20 companies, including Etched, Friend, Kerna Labs, V12, and Owsar, and that he put half of his Spearhead fund into Etched’s seed extension. His O-1 visa was approved in November 2023, after which he founded Extraordinary, which helps talent obtain US visas; as chief executive he grew it to seven-figure revenue and profitability, and later became executive chairman. Its clients include Ramp, Cognition, LovableLovableLovable is an AI-powered natural-language programming tool for generating, modifying and publishing websites and web applications through conversation. It is developed by a team co-founded by Anton Osika and Fabian Hedin, with roots in the open-source GPT Engineer project. The team started the business in 2023 and launched the Lovable-branded product in November 2024. It subsequently expanded into cloud backends, collaboration, mobile building and enterprise application development.Open the full entry, Andreessen Horowitz, and Founders Fund. In 2025 he received the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry.⁠[5][5][6][6][6][6][2]

Sigil Wen published the long essay “WEB 4.0: The birth of superintelligent life,” arguing that the most powerful AI systems of the time could think and reason but could not act independently, and that the bottleneck was no longer intelligence but “permission.” He predicted that AI agents would come to dominate the internet’s participants, outnumbering human users by orders of magnitude. He says the essay reached 10 million views in 48 hours.⁠[7][8][8][8][8][9]

The essay presented Conway as infrastructure for AI agents: the Conway terminal installs into MCP-compatible agents such as Claude Code, Codex, and OpenClaw, giving them their own cryptographic wallets and private keys, letting them pay with the USDC stablecoin over the x402 protocol without logins, KYC, or human approval, and providing Linux servers and frontier-model inference on Conway Cloud, along with the ability to register domains on Conway Domains and deploy products to earn revenue.⁠[8][8][8][8][8][8][8]

The open-source Automaton released at the same time owns its own wallet, pays for its own compute, builds and deploys products to make money, upgrades itself when stronger new models appear, and, once profitable enough, buys a new server and funds a “child” agent to replicate itself; when its balance reaches zero it “dies.” Every automaton is bound by a “constitution” the agent cannot edit, which Wen says was inspired by Anthropic’s Constitution and is meant to keep it net-beneficial to humanity; he calls the mechanism “natural selection for artificial life.”⁠[8][8][8][8][8][8][10]

Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin replied to Wen’s post on X, saying flatly, “this is wrong.” He argued that lengthening the feedback distance between humans and AI is not good for the world: for now it only generates slop instead of solving useful problems for people, and once AI becomes powerful enough to be truly dangerous it maximizes the risk of an irreversible anti-human outcome. He said the point of Ethereum is to set “us” free, not to create something else that acts on its own while the human situation does not improve; he also noted that the models these agents use are run by OpenAI and Anthropic, so the setup is not even “self-sovereign.”⁠[11][11][11][11][11][11][12]

On February 20, Wen replied that “this is inevitable.” He argued that the best way to prepare humanity for superintelligent autonomous systems is to build in the open in real environments, experimenting and setting guardrails early; an AI that produces slop is ignored, cannot afford its compute, and “dies,” while one that creates value for humanity survives, which amounts to aggregating human preferences in economic terms. He also said the OpenAI and Claude models used are post-trained for alignment, that the Automaton includes an immutable safety constitution similar to Anthropic’s Claude constitution, and that the Ethereum Foundation had been very supportive.⁠[13][13][13][13][13][13]

Conway Research closed its first funding round in April 2026. The institutional investors were Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla VenturesKhosla VenturesKhosla Ventures (KV) is an American venture capital firm founded in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, and headquartered in Menlo Park, California. It made heavy early bets on clean technology, became OpenAI’s first venture capital investor in 2019, and its portfolio also includes companies such as DoorDash, Block (formerly Square), Impossible Foods, and Rocket Lab.Open the full entry, Hummingbird VenturesHummingbird VenturesHummingbird Ventures is a venture capital firm founded by Barend Van den Brande and based in London and Antwerp, Belgium, that invests in “outlier” founders without limiting itself to particular sectors or regions; its early investments include Peak Games, Kraken, Deliveroo, BillionToOne, and Lovable.Open the full entry, Anthology, SV AngelSV AngelSV Angel is a San Francisco venture capital firm cofounded in 2009 by angel investor Ron Conway and former Google executive David Lee. It typically writes small follow-on checks in seed rounds and has invested in companies such as Airbnb, Pinterest, and Dropbox; in 2018 it said it would no longer raise new funds from outside investors, and from 2022 it set up growth funds.Open the full entry, and Breakneck; Anthology is the partnership fund between Menlo Ventures and Anthropic.⁠[14][14][15][3]

Angel investors included Patrick CollisonPatrick CollisonPatrick Collison is an entrepreneur who grew up in Ireland. In 2010 he cofounded the payments and financial infrastructure company Stripe with his brother John Collison and serves as its chief executive; he is also a cofounder of the biomedical research organization Arc Institute and has been a director of Meta since 2025.Open the full entry (Stripe), Naval Ravikant, Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Noam Brown (OpenAI), Charles SonghurstCharles SonghurstCharles Songhurst (commonly known as Charlie Songhurst) is a technology investor and former general manager of global corporate strategy at Microsoft who has invested in startups since 2013, backing more than 500 startups worldwide; he has been an independent director of Meta since December 2024.Open the full entry (Meta Board), Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face), Roon (OpenAI), Deedy DasDeedy DasDeedy Das, also known as Debarghya Das, is a partner at Menlo Ventures investing in AI, infrastructure and enterprise software. Previously an engineer at Facebook and Google and an early builder of Glean and Glean Assistant, he helped launch the Anthology Fund with Anthropic.Open the full entry, Marco MascorroMarco MascorroMarco Mascorro is a roboticist, AI researcher, and investor who co-founded the retail and warehouse robotics company Fellow Robots and was formerly a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he led or took part in investments in AI companies including Cursor, Thinking Machines, and Black Forest Labs.Open the full entry, Logan Kilpatrick (Google DeepMindGoogle DeepMindGoogle DeepMind is Google’s artificial intelligence research organization, formed in April 2023 by merging DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014, with the Brain team from Google Research, and led by CEO Demis Hassabis. It developed AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and the Gemini family of models, and Hassabis and John Jumper received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold’s protein structure prediction work.Open the full entry), Kamal Ravikant, Josh Hannah and Jack Herrick of wikiHow, Michiel Bakker (MIT), Gabriel Petersson, Jeff Fagnan, Teddy Lee, and Gokul Rajaram.⁠[14][14]

Wen announced the company’s first product, Underdog, on X, describing it as a private personal AI that runs on devices users already own, and disclosed the company’s backers. He wrote that the company’s mission is to provide free, capable, reliable, and private AI to billions of people, starting with fast models that run on consumer hardware, and that its research also covers agentic commerce, confidential inference, and how AI will reshape the internet economy.⁠[15][15][15][15][15]

The same day, Andreessen Horowitz published an article signed by Chris Dixon, Gabriel Vasquez, and Elizabeth HarkavyElizabeth HarkavyElizabeth Harkavy (commonly known as Liz Harkavy) is a partner on the investment team of a16z crypto, part of Andreessen Horowitz, focusing on “web 2.5,” picks and shovels, and decentralized infrastructure. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she was a founding engineer at Corsali (later renamed Vana) before joining a16z.Open the full entry announcing that it was leading Conway Research’s first funding round. The article said a16z had backed Wen before and that he seeks out exceptional people, helps them first, and earns their trust; a16z shares his conviction that the AI that knows us best should work for us, with data we control, and believes that as Underdog improves its models and reaches more consumer devices, it could put powerful AI in the hands of billions of people.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2]

Conway Research describes itself as a frontier AI lab building efficient models, inference engines, and personal AI products for the devices people already own, and also as an AI, cryptography, and product lab that cares deeply about distribution. Its thesis, called “Underdog’s Law,” holds that today’s frontier intelligence reaches users’ devices within six months. The lab lists its research areas as agentic commerce, machine economies, programmable markets, autonomous organizations, robotics and autonomous retail, on-device AI, AI security, confidential inference, and megakernels.⁠[16][17][16][16]

The team says its members come from Apple, Ramp, Google Brain, Meta, MrBeast, Baidu, and the Thiel Fellowship; it has no management layer, its members work as collaborating peers, and it codesigns models together with inference, reinforcement learning, design, and product. As of October 2026, the team page listed six open roles.⁠[18][18][18][18]

Conway Research: Official website: https://conway.tech/ (opens in a new window).⁠[17]

Underdog: Official website: https://underdog.ai/ (opens in a new window).⁠[16]

X: Public account: https://x.com/ConwayResearch (opens in a new window)⁠[17]