Inception Labs
inceptionlabs.ai
Actively hiring
AI Research Labs
Foundation Models
LLM & Generative AI
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Funding and backers
Grants
$664k
2 grants · CORDIS
Backers
4
Amplifypartners, Innovation Endeavors
Momentum
15/100
in the news
Last sign of life
this month
a posting or a news item
The story so fareach stage dated by its source: the company's releases, the press, registers, filings
Sep 8
On the Hacker News front page Mercury 2.5 · 248 points
Feb 24
On the Hacker News front page Mercury 2: Fast reasoning LLM powered by diffusion · 351 points
Apr 30, 2025
On the Hacker News front page Mercury: Commercial-scale diffusion language model · 385 points
Feb 26, 2025
On the Hacker News front page Mercury Coder: frontier diffusion LLM generating 1000+ tok/sec on commodity GPUs · 101 points
Jan 1, 2025
Won a grant $287k · CORDIS
2024
Founded
Jan 1, 2021
Won a grant $377k · CORDIS
Tractionpublic signals, read monthly
Web presence
top 0.42%
of 133.2M domains by links, Common Crawl
Hacker News stories
12
best: 385 points
Funding rounds
Backed byfrom the funds' portfolios and accelerator catalogs
Amplifypartners 
Innovation Endeavors 
Mayfield 
Menlo Ventures Investors in similar startupsfunds that back the companies most like this one
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Overview
Inception Labs builds diffusion based large language models that generate text in parallel instead of one token at a time. Its Mercury family targets inference speeds several times faster than autoregressive systems of comparable quality, which matters most for latency sensitive agent and coding workloads. The company was founded by researchers from Stanford, UCLA and Cornell who pioneered diffusion modelling for discrete data; its models are available through an API and as weights for enterprise deployment.
News
Introducing Mercury 2.5 - Inception
Mercury 2.5 is the most capable diffusion LLM on the market. It runs at 1,107 tokens/sec and offers a 40% increase in intelligence over Mercury 2, comparable to cost-optimized frontier models.
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Report
Inception Launches Mercury 2.5, the Next Tier of Intelligence for Diffusion LLMs
Inception, the company behind the first commercial diffusion large language models (dLLMs), today announced the launch of Mercury 2.5, the most capable dLLM ...
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Report
Introducing Mercury Edit 2 - Inception
A next-edit diffusion LLM built for the fastest parts of your coding workflow
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Report
Mercury 2 on PinchBench: Fast Diffusion Models and the Personal Agent Era - Inception
We evaluated Mercury 2 on PinchBench, the open-source benchmark built on top of OpenClaw - the fastest-growing open-source project in GitHub history, with 250K+ stars in under 60 days.
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Report
GitHub - welidev/inception-ai-provider: Ai sdk provider for Inception
Ai sdk provider for Inception. Contribute to welidev/inception-ai-provider development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Report
Report
The Next Step for dLLMs: Scaling up Mercury - Inception
Today, we're shipping an across-the-board upgrade to Mercury's capabilities. This includes massively better performance on coding, instruction following, mathematical reasoning, and knowledge recall tasks.
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Report
Introducing Mercury, the World's First Commercial-Scale Diffusion Large Language Model. - Inception
We trained diffusion large language models that are up to 10x faster and cheaper than current LLMs, pushing the frontier of intelligence and speed for language models.
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Report
Offices
Where the company hires and what each office is for
Cities
1
Hiring now
0
Countries
1
Palo Alto
United States
HQ