Inception raises $50 million to build diffusion models for code and text

With so much money flooding into AI startups, it’s a good time to be an AI researcher with an idea to test out. And if the idea is novel enough, it might be easier to get the resources you need as an independent company instead of inside one of the big labs.

That’s the story of Inception, a startup developing diffusion-based AI models that just raised $50 million in seed funding led by Menlo Ventures. Andrew Ng and Andrej Karpathy provided additional angel funding.

The leader of the project is Stanford professor Stefano Ermon, whose research focuses on diffusion models — which generate outputs through iterative refinement rather than word-by-word. These models power image-based AI systems like Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and Sora. Having worked on those systems since before the AI boom