Stefano Ermon is Co-Founder and CEO of Inception Labs, a Palo Alto-based AI company pioneering diffusion-based large language models that generate text up to 10x faster than traditional autoregressive LLMs.

Stefano earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University in 2015 and went on to become an Associate Professor at Stanford University, where he co-invented foundational AI technologies including DDIM, FlashAttention, DPO, GAIL, and score-based diffusion models.

Stefano is a recipient of the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award (the highest honor for junior AI researchers), a Sloan Fellowship, NSF Career Award, and multiple Best Paper Awards at top AI venues including ICML, AAAI, and NeurIPS.

Prior to Inception, Stefano co-founded Atlas AI, a company leveraging satellite imagery and machine learning to estimate socioeconomic indicators, and has been a prolific researcher with over 144,000 academic citations.

Inception Labs raised $50M in seed funding led by Menlo Ventures, with backing from Mayfield, NVIDIA, Microsoft M12, Databricks, and Snowflake, and its Mercury diffusion LLM models are available via AWS Bedrock, OpenRouter, and Poe.