Inherent bets AI-native science needs new labs: ex-DeepMind team raises $50M

Inherent is a London AI lab building Faraday, an AI system that pairs human researchers with self-improving AI to pursue open-ended scientific discovery; it calls the goal 'AI-native science' and aims to write its playbook.

Machines capable of open-ended exploration can catalyze new inventions — science must be rebuilt around humans and self-improving AI, not AI grafted onto old methods.

$50 million seed, led by Index Ventures with Radical Ventures (announced May 2026)

Tantum Collins and Edward Hughes first met while researching cooperative AI at DeepMind; Collins later handled AI policy at the Biden White House. With fellow DeepMind researcher Louis Kirsch and infrastructure specialist Kaloyan Aleksiev (Reka AI, Microsoft), they founded Inherent in stealth in 2025. Faraday, named after the 19th-century scientist Michael Faraday, is the system they set out to build.

In May 2026 Inherent emerged from stealth with a $50M seed led by Index Ventures, with Radical Ventures participating. Matt Clifford CBE — Entrepreneurs First co-founder and former UK government AI adviser — joined as an advisor, and early hires and angels include technical-safety and democratic-AI specialists. The company is incorporated as a public benefit corporation; Index Ventures calls it a 'recursive company' where organizational design and research feed each other.

DeepMind alumni saw frontier AI's limit first-hand: systems excel at convergent, well-specified problems but flounder at open-ended discovery — deciding which questions are worth asking at all.

Treating organizational design as a research problem is a differentiation frontier labs cannot buy: the way Inherent runs becomes the moat that shapes the system it is building.

A $50M seed led by Index Ventures with Radical Ventures, plus advisers like Matt Clifford, is institutional conviction that AI-native science can become a category of its own.

Incorporating as a public benefit corporation with technical-safety specialists among early hires answers the governance objection that frontier AI labs usually face later.

Bold AI bets can be organizational before technical: Inherent made human-agent collaboration part of the product itself — investors funded the thesis, but real discoveries are the test.

As of September 2, 2026, Inherent is out of stealth and still building: no model, product or scientific result is public yet, and its manifesto describes Faraday as in development with recruitment open. The $50M seed announced in May 2026 funds early work on AI scientists for open-ended research. The company competes in a crowded space — DeepMind itself has AlphaFold and other scientific tools, and many startups target the same AI-plus-research intersection — so the open question is whether Faraday can produce genuine breakthroughs, not incremental productivity gains.