Inception Labs

Inception Labs is a research-and-product company based in Palo Alto, California, founded in the summer of 2024 by Stefano Ermon, Aditya Grover and Volodymyr Kuleshov. The company develops diffusion large language models (diffusion LLMs, dLLMs) that generate text in parallel through iterative denoising instead of the sequential, token-by-token decoding used by autoregressive models. Its flagship product is the Mercury family, which includes models such as Mercury Coder, Mercury 2, Mercury 2.5 and Mercury Voice. Among its investors and backers the company lists Mayfield Fund as well as angel investors including Andrew Ng and Andrej Karpathy.