TL;DR
London AI lab Inherent raised $50M from Index Ventures and Radical Ventures to build self-improving AI for scientific discovery. Ex-UK AI tsar Matt Clifford advises.
London-based AI lab Inherent emerged from stealth on Wednesday with a $50 million seed round co-led by Index Ventures and Radical Ventures. Nvidia’s venture arm NVentures also participated, alongside Ex/Ante, Metaplanet, Macroscopic Ventures, and Mythos Ventures. It is among Europe’s largest AI stealth-to-launch rounds in 2026.
The founding team comes from DeepMind, Microsoft, and Reka AI. Tantum Collins and Edward Hughes previously collaborated on cooperative AI research at DeepMind. Louis Kirsch, another co-founder, also worked at DeepMind. Kaloyan Aleksiev came from Reka AI and Microsoft.
Collins has a policy background that most AI lab founders lack. He worked on AI policy at the Biden White House before co-founding Inherent. Matt Clifford, co-founder of Entrepreneurs First and the UK government’s former AI tsar, has joined as an adviser.
Inherent is building a platform called Faraday, named after the scientist. Its purpose is not to answer questions faster. It is to figure out which questions are worth asking in the first place.
“Most AI is built to answer questions. What it can’t do yet is figure out which questions are worth asking, the open-ended curiosity that produced penicillin, the microwave, the GPU,” said Danny Rimer, partner at Index Ventures. “That’s the gap Inherent is building into.”
Faraday pairs human researchers with AI agents that are designed to improve themselves iteratively on hard scientific problems. The company describes this as “AI-native science,” a paradigm it says will look and feel different from the scientific method as practised for the past 400 years.
Index Ventures framed the bet in those terms. “AI-native science will be messier, less legible, but capable of exceptional outcomes,” the firm wrote in a blog post announcing the investment. The conviction is that the most valuable application of frontier AI is not automating existing workflows but enabling discoveries that human researchers could not reach alone.
Inherent is structured as a public benefit corporation, a legal form that requires the company to consider its impact on society alongside shareholder returns. The structure is unusual for a venture-backed AI lab. It signals that the founders view governance as a competitive advantage rather than a constraint.
European AI startups are increasingly demonstrating that they can raise at scales previously reserved for Silicon Valley. Inherent’s $50 million seed sits alongside Peec AI’s $10 million ARR in six months, Lovable’s $100 million single-month revenue, and Mistral’s $300 million ARR. The gap between European and American AI funding is narrowing for companies building in categories where the technology is genuinely new.
Anthropic’s Glasswing project demonstrated that frontier AI can find vulnerabilities at a rate that outpaces human remediation. Inherent’s bet is that the same dynamic applies to scientific discovery: AI agents that can explore hypothesis spaces faster than human researchers can, while humans provide the judgment, taste, and ethical guardrails that agents cannot.
The team’s combination of DeepMind research credentials and White House policy experience gives it unusual positioning. It can credibly pitch to both the scientific establishment and the government institutions that fund basic research. Whether Faraday delivers on the promise of AI-native science will take years to evaluate. The $50 million buys the time to find out.
