Inherent Raises $50M to Build AI That Asks the Right Scientific Questions

The conversation around artificial intelligence is often dominated by chatbots that provide instant answers. A newly launched London-based AI lab, Inherent, is betting on a profoundly different vision: building AI that figures out which questions are worth asking in the first place. The company emerged from stealth with a $50 million seed round, aiming to pioneer what it calls "AI-native science."

The Founding Team Behind Inherent

Inherent brings together a founding team of four researchers, three of whom share a pedigree from Google DeepMind.

• Tantum Collins is a former DeepMind researcher who later transitioned into AI policy, working at the Biden White House.
• Edward Hughes also worked at DeepMind, where he and Collins collaborated on frontier research into cooperative AI.
• Louis Kirsch is another DeepMind alum on the founding team.
• Kaloyan Aleksiev rounds out the group, having previously worked at the AI startup Reka AI and Microsoft.

The lab has also attracted prominent advisory support. Matt Clifford, the former UK government AI tsar, has been recruited as an adviser. He expressed strong confidence in the team, describing them as "some of the most impressive, thoughtful and ambitious founders I've met."

The Vision: AI-Native Science

Currently, most scientific AI acts as a powerful calculator or pattern-matching tool to accelerate existing experiments. Inherent's mission is to transform this dynamic. The lab is working toward a paradigm where AI is an integral part of the scientific discovery process itself—generating hypotheses, identifying promising research directions, and driving open-ended exploration.

Index Ventures partner Danny Rimer framed the core problem the company is solving: "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. That's the gap Inherent is building into."

Faraday: The Platform for Discovery

To achieve this mission, Inherent is developing its AI platform named Faraday, after the English physicist Michael Faraday who made foundational discoveries in electromagnetism. The system is designed specifically to combine human scientific research with advanced AI in order to produce novel inventions and innovations.

The $50 Million Backing

The significant seed round that launched Inherent was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Radical Ventures. Beyond the core venture firms, the article notes that early angel investors and hires include specialists in technical AI safety and democratic applications of AI, signaling the company's focus on responsible and society-aware development.

Inherent's debut places it among a wave of new London-based AI labs, such as Latent Labs, that are securing major early-stage funding with a focus on using AI to drive breakthroughs in fundamental science rather than deploying it for narrower commercial tasks right away.