📝 Inception raises $50M

In partnership with

News of the Day

Inception, a Stanford spinout led by professor Stefano Ermon, has raised $50 million in seed funding to build a new generation of diffusion-based AI models that promise faster, cheaper, and more efficient performance than today’s large language models. The round was led by Menlo Ventures with backing from Mayfield, Innovation Endeavors, Microsoft’s M12 fund, Snowflake Ventures, Databricks Investment, and Nvidia’s NVentures, along with angel investments from Andrew Ng and Andrej Karpathy. Inception’s flagship model, Mercury, already integrated into tools like ProxyAI and Kilo Code, reimagines AI text generation by refining responses holistically rather than word-by-word — a shift from the autoregressive approach that powers GPT and Gemini. By harnessing parallel processing instead of sequential prediction, Mercury benchmarks over 1,000 tokens per second, dramatically reducing latency and compute costs. For Ermon, who helped pioneer diffusion models before they powered tools like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, the mission is to prove that diffusion isn’t just for images — it could redefine how software is written, optimized, and scaled.

If you have tweets you want to submit to be featured here (from you or someone you like), reply to this email with a link!

Chart of the Day