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Inception

What Inception does

Inception is an AI research and product company building diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) for production applications where latency, throughput, and multi-step agent loops matter. On its website, the company contrasts diffusion-based generation (parallel coarse-to-fine refinement across a small number of steps) with autoregressive “token-by-token, left-to-right” decoding, arguing diffusion can enable a different speed–cost curve that better fits always-on, high-volume systems. Inception’s flagship model family is Mercury, which it positions as a commercially available diffusion LLM designed to integrate into existing LLM workflows and serve as a drop-in replacement in latency-sensitive deployments via an API and enterprise/on-prem deployment options.

News

Company record

Aug 11, 2026 · Official · Inception (Blog)Mercury 2 for Search: Fast enough to run a hundred times per query

Inception described Mercury 2 as fast enough to run many LLM calls per search query while fitting within an application latency budget, and discussed an approach to retrieval-vs-recall evaluation for search pipelines.

Jul 29, 2026 · Official · Inception (Blog)More builders. More throughput. Better Mercury 2.

Inception announced changes aimed at making Mercury 2 easier to build with, including additional free tokens per new API key, higher rate limits, and a faster/more capable model (as described in the post).

Jul 14, 2026 · Official · Inception (Blog)Mercury 2: the first reasoning model fast enough to pick up the phone

Inception introduced Mercury 2 as a reasoning diffusion language model, highlighting decoding throughput (1000+ tokens/sec on NVIDIA GPUs) and latency/cost framing for real-time conversational use cases.

Jun 24, 2026 · Official · Inception (Blog)Mercury 2 on Azure Foundry

Inception announced availability of Mercury 2 on Azure AI Foundry, describing how developers can provision an endpoint for the model via Azure’s enterprise infrastructure.

Jan 12, 2026 · Official · Inception (Blog)SearchBlox + Inception: Real-Time GenAI Search at Enterprise Scale

Inception announced that SearchBlox SearchAI integrates Inception’s Mercury dLLM, positioning the partnership as enabling sub-second GenAI responses across enterprise workloads.

Nov 06, 2025 · Reporting · Yahoo Finance (Business Wire distribution)Inception Raises $50M to Power Diffusion LLMs, Increasing LLM Speed and Efficiency by up to 10X and Unlocking Real-Time, Accessible AI Applications

Inception announced it raised $50 million, describing the round as support for building diffusion large language models and emphasizing speed/efficiency improvements for real-time applications.

Oct 27, 2025 · Official · Inception (Blog)ProxyAI + Inception

Inception posted about a partnership with ProxyAI to bring faster, more consistent code edits to ProxyAI.

Source map · 3 recurring channels · 20 references

Still resolving: Newsroom

What it builds

Mercury

Mercury is Inception’s diffusion-based large language model family, positioned for production use and offered through its platform and API.

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Mercury Coder

Mercury Coder is Inception’s diffusion model for code generation workflows, intended to provide fast code completions as part of latency-sensitive developer experiences.

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Mercury Edit 2

Mercury Edit 2 is Inception’s next-edit diffusion model, built for latency-sensitive “next-edit prediction” inside development workflows; it complements an auto-complete endpoint on the Inception platform.

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Mercury 2

Mercury 2 is Inception’s diffusion reasoning model, positioned for fast reasoning and real-time conversational latency, including use cases such as voice agents and multi-step tool-calling loops.

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Mercury 2 for Search

Mercury 2 for Search is Inception’s application of Mercury 2 to agentic search/RAG-style pipelines that may require many LLM calls per query within a single latency budget.

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Inception Platform (API)

Inception provides access to its models through its API platform, which includes endpoints for model capabilities such as chat completions and edit/next-edit workflows.

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Mercury Chat (playground)

Mercury Chat is Inception’s public playground for interacting with its Mercury models.

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Key metrics

Milestones & partnerships