Inception Labs
startupInception Labs was founded in 2024 by Stefano Ermon (Stanford, co-inventor of diffusion models for images, DDIM, and DPO), Aditya Grover (UCLA, IJCAI Computers and Thought Award), and Volodymyr Kuleshov (Cornell Tech). Raised $56M in seed funding from Menlo Ventures, with angel investors including Andrew Ng and Andrej Karpathy.
The lab introduced diffusion-based LLMs (dLLMs) — a fundamentally different generation paradigm where tokens are produced in parallel via iterative denoising rather than one-at-a-time autoregressive generation. Mercury models achieve ~1,000 tokens/sec on H100, roughly 10x faster than comparable autoregressive models. Mercury 2 (February 2026) reaches AA index 33 with reasoning capability.
People
- Stefano Ermon Google ScholarOpenReview — CEO & Co-Founder (formerly Stanford University (Associate Professor); PhD Cornell)
- Aditya Grover Google Scholar — CTO & Co-Founder (formerly UCLA (Assistant Professor); PhD Stanford)
- Volodymyr Kuleshov Google Scholar — Chief Scientist & Co-Founder (formerly Cornell Tech (Assistant Professor); PhD Stanford)
News
- 2026-02-17 Mercury 2 Released: Diffusion LLM with AA Index 33 at 1000 tok/s — Inception Labs
- 2025-11-01 Inception Labs Raises $56M Seed from Menlo, Andrew Ng, Karpathy — Inception Labs