Stefano Ermon is the CEO and co-founder of Inception Labs, the company behind Mercury - the world's first commercial-scale diffusion LLM. An Italian-born Stanford associate professor on leave, Ermon co-invented DDIM (the speedup trick powering modern image generation), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO, the alignment technique used to fine-tune today's leading LLMs), and the SEDD discrete diffusion framework that won ICML 2024's Best Paper Award. At Inception, he's betting that diffusion - not autoregression - is the architecture that will define the next generation of AI, with Mercury 2 clocking 1,000+ tokens per second at a fraction of the cost of GPT or Claude.
Isaiah Boone is a Partner on Sequoia Capital's growth team, focusing on enterprise applications, infrastructure, commerce, and marketplaces. A Pomona College math and statistics graduate, he cut his teeth at RBC Wealth Management and Leonard Green & Partners before joining Sequoia in December 2020. His portfolio includes category-defining companies like Ramp, Rippling, Mercury, Meter, Faire, and Island - businesses reshaping how companies manage money, people, and infrastructure.
Immad Akhund is the co-founder and CEO of Mercury, the digital banking platform trusted by 1 in 3 U.S. startups with $650M+ in annualized revenue and a $3.5B valuation. A Cambridge-trained computer scientist who came up through Y Combinator twice, he has built and sold two prior startups (Clickpass, Heyzap), made 350+ angel investments in companies like Airtable, Substack, and Rippling, and in April 2026 secured conditional OCC approval to charter Mercury Bank, N.A.