Rian Smith

🧵 We launched Latitude (@rtp) last week. Lots covered, so I want to double-click on Global Fiat Payouts. Fund us in USD. Pay anyone in 50+ countries in local currency. Under 2 minutes on average. It runs on stablecoin rails, but you don't need to think about that any more than you think about the protocol behind email when you hit send.

The research journey to create diffusion LLMs has been 10+ years in the making. My cofounders and I have been at the forefront of this work, from score-based generative modeling to SEDD to Mercury 2. @amplifypartners put together an excellent deep dive: amplifypartners.com/blog-posts/eve…

Full story here: fortune.com/2026/03/31/exc…

Hello World! Latitude is live. We built stablecoin-to-local-fiat infrastructure across 50+ countries so businesses can move money globally at a flat 0.5% rate, with no hidden spreads or volume commitments. Global payments are broken. We're fixing the rails. $8M seed led by NEA. Team from Uber, Coinbase, Stripe, and more. Full story in Fortune (in comments)

Over a decade ago at Uber, we were paying drivers across 40 countries. Their top ask: "Pay me faster." That stuck with me through Coinbase and Stripe, where I kept running into the same wall from different angles. Today, Latitude (@rtp) is launching out of stealth. We raised an $8M seed round in Jan 2025 and have been building quietly since then.

@timt recently sat down with @_inception_ai's founders to tell the full story — from Stanford to building the first commercial diffusion LLM. Watch the conversation here: menlovc.com/perspective/fr…

A new @VSCPR milestone: Team members born AFTER our founding. !23!

What if language models didn't have to generate one token at a time? Our CEO @StefanoErmon joined @TBPN to break down how Mercury 2's diffusion LLM hits 1,000+ tok/s on standard NVIDIA GPUs — and why speed changes the product for coding, voice agents, and search.

Everyone's talking about AI taking jobs. How about AI that's actually helping people do their jobs more safely and successfully? Meet Multitude Insights. We met Matthew White and Akihiko Izu several years ago as they were building something different — a platform that helps police officers connect the dots between crimes and solve cases faster. This is exactly the kind of AI we believe in at VSC Ventures: not flashy, not hype-driven, but deeply practical technology making a real difference in the field. @JayKapoorNYC, Maggie Philbin, and I have worked hand in hand with Matt and Aki ever since — helping them sharpen their positioning and build awareness. That collaboration led to national media attention, earning coverage in the Wall Street Journal and Boston Globe, because stories like this deserve to be told. Today, we're excited that the company has raised its Series A and welcome @JasonrShuman to the 'ride-along' with existing investors Commonweal Ventures and Counterview Capital. This is what "Dirty Jobs AI" looks like — AI applied to the essential, unglamorous, and critically important work that keeps communities safe. It's not always the sexiest investment thesis, but it's the one we keep coming back to because it just makes sense. Another day, another case closed:)

Reasoning AI just got 5x faster. @_inception_ai launched Mercury 2, the first reasoning dLLM. Built on diffusion, it refines in parallel instead of one token at a time. Production-ready for agents, voice, and code. @dinabass has more in @business : bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Happy Tuesday. Big show today: - @patrickc (Stripe) - @collision (Stripe) - @bgurley (Benchmark) - @ivanhzhao (Notion) - @StefanoErmon (Inception AI) - @thejamescad (Profound) - @RuneKvist (AIUC) - @reinerpope (MatX) - @devanshpandey (SI) See you on the stream.

Mercury 2 is now live! 🚀 The fastest reasoning LLM built for production speed. ~1000 tokens/sec vs <200 tokens/sec for comparable models. What this enables: 🤖 Fast agents: fast iteration loops, no compounding delays 🎙️ Voice and Search AI: tight turn-taking, natural conversations under strict latency budgets 💻 Interactive code completions, editing, and design workflows

Mercury 2 is live 🚀🚀 The world’s first reasoning diffusion LLM, delivering 5x faster performance than leading speed-optimized LLMs. Watching the team turn years of research into a real product never gets old, and I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve built. We’re just getting started on what diffusion can do for language.

Mercury 2 is live. The world's first reasoning diffusion LLM – 5x faster than leading speed-optimized autoregressive models. Built for production: multi-step agents without delays, voice AI with tight latency budgets, instant coding feedback. Diffusion-based generation enables parallel refinement, not sequential tokens. Faster. More controllable. Dramatically lower inference cost. Available today on the Inception API. @dinabass has the story in @business.

"The most urgent film of our time." THE AI DOC: OR HOW I BECAME AN APOCALOPTIMIST is only in theaters March 27. Watch the trailer now.

The more structure a language has, the faster diffusion can run. Code fits that profile. Code has plenty of it. Listen to @justkharbanda on how diffusion unlocks speed for real-world coding workloads. #Diffusion #AIInfrastructure #DeveloperTools

"It's now or never." Our CEO @stefanoermon on why he started Inception – featured this week in @WSJ. We're building dLLMs that generate tokens in parallel. Faster. More efficient. More controllable. This is the moment. Thanks for the coverage @KateClarkTweets wsj.com/tech/ai/these-…

Hello world, we’re @GraphonAI We showed up to @agihouse_org’s Gemini Build Day to see if devs would care… Turns out 1 in 4 teams built on Graphon 👀 • “Better than other model providers on factual queries and quality” (their words, not ours) • Used alongside Gemini for things like drug discovery • $1k prize → tie between two Graphon-powered teams All projects here: app.agihouse.org/events/gemini-… More to come from us next year 🙂

🚨 New funding: @CodoxoInc raised its $35M Series C, led by CVS Health Ventures, to scale its GenAI-powered Point Zero Payment Integrity solutions – stopping healthcare payment errors before they happen. @axios has the exclusive: bit.ly/493MpjR