New architectures & efficiency · Palo Alto, US · founded 2024
Inception Labs: who founded it, who funds it
Inception Labs is a Palo Alto AI architecture lab founded in 2024 by Stefano Ermon, Aditya Grover and Volodymyr Kuleshov, who came from Stanford, UCLA and Cornell. What it is building: diffusion language models: Mercury, the first commercial dLLM, for faster and cheaper code and text. It has raised $50M in disclosed rounds, most recently a Seed of $50M in November 2025, led by Menlo Ventures. It sells access through an API.
- Founders
- Stefano Ermon (ex-Stanford), Aditya Grover (ex-UCLA), Volodymyr Kuleshov (ex-Cornell)
- Founders from
- ex-Stanford, ex-UCLA, ex-Cornell
- Location
- Palo Alto, US (North America)
- Valuation
- $500M estimate, per source
- Raised
- $50M disclosed
- Investors
- Menlo Ventures lead, Mayfield, Innovation Endeavors, Nvidia, Microsoft, Andrew Ng, Andrej Karpathy
- What ships
- API
Rounds
| Date | Round | Amount | Valuation | Lead | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 6, 2025 | Seed | $50M | · | Menlo Ventures | techcrunch.com |
Sources
- Scaling up Mercury inceptionlabs.ai
News
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Sep 9, 2026
+1 more coverage
- YouTube Every Millisecond Matters: Aditya Grover (Inception Labs) on Diffusion LLMs & Voice AI | …
- Jun 21, 2026
- May 18, 2026
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Feb 24, 2026
+1 more coverage
- The Neuron 😸 AI News Roundup: Wednesday, Feb 25
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Dec 11, 2025
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Nov 6, 2025
+1 more coverage
- Tech Funding News Inception Labs banks $50M to make diffusion LLMs 10x faster
Investors who back other labs here
- Nvidia also: Safe Superintelligence, Reflection AI, Skild AI, Poolside
- Menlo Ventures also: Skild AI, Prime Intellect
- Andrej Karpathy also: Standard Intelligence
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