Inception Labs
US company founded in 2024 by three computer science professors; builds diffusion language models (Mercury) offered through an API.
| Model | Released | Weights | Hosts | Cheapest host | Input | Output |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mercury 3−50% | Oct 2026 | Closed | 3 | Inception Labs | $0.10 | $0.35 |
1 of 1 models · prices per million tokens at the cheapest host, read Nov 3, 14:15 UTC
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About Inception Labs
- Headquarters
- Redwood City, California, USA1
Inception was founded in 2024 by Stanford computer science professor Stefano Ermon, who brought in UCLA professor Aditya Grover and Cornell professor Volodymyr Kuleshov to co-lead it.2, 3
It builds large language models that generate text by diffusion rather than one token at a time, and calls them Mercury.4, 9
Its first publicly available model was Mercury Coder, a diffusion LLM for code generation, described in a technical report submitted in June 2025.7, 8
It then introduced Mercury 2, a reasoning model.6
In October 2026 it released Mercury 3, which it says is more than 40 times larger than Mercury 1, on its own API platform and through OpenRouter, Baseten and Vercel.3, 5
Its terms of use give an address in Redwood City, California, and as of October 2026 Stefano Ermon is its chief executive officer.1, 3, 6
Official links
- Website inceptionlabs.ai
- API docs docs.inceptionlabs.ai/get-started/get-started
- Pricing inceptionlabs.ai/models
- Blog inceptionlabs.ai/blog
- X x.com/_inception_ai
- LinkedIn linkedin.com/company/inception-labs-ai
Sources
- Terms of Use – Inception · inceptionlabs.ai · read Oct 26
- Inception emerges from stealth with a new type of AI model | TechCrunch · techcrunch.com · read Oct 26
- Inception says Mercury 3 beats GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 at up to 8x the speed - SiliconANGLE · siliconangle.com · read Oct 26
- Inception – When Every Millisecond Matters · inceptionlabs.ai · read Oct 26
- Diffusion at Scale: Introducing Mercury 3 – Inception · inceptionlabs.ai · read Oct 26
- Introducing Mercury 2 – Inception · inceptionlabs.ai · read Oct 26
- Introducing Mercury, the World’s First Commercial-Scale Diffusion Large Language Model. – Inception · inceptionlabs.ai · read Oct 26
- [2506.17298] Mercury: Ultra-Fast Language Models Based on Diffusion · arxiv.org · read Oct 26
- About – Inception · inceptionlabs.ai · read Oct 26
Every fact above links to its source and the date it was read; last checked Oct 26. Not affiliated with Inception Labs. Corrections or removal on request: contact.