Inherent, a London-based AI lab that aims to reinvent the scientific method, has emerged from stealth with a $50m (£37.2m) fund raise.
Founded by former staff of DeepMind, Microsoft and the White House, Inherent is planning to create what it calls the playbook for AI-native science.
It is building an AI system called Faraday, named after the 19th century scientist Michael Faraday, that it hopes will bring an element of scientific curiosity and discovery to AI technology. With it, human researchers and self-improving AI could theoretically be supported in a new wave of scientific discovery.
The funding round has been led by Index Ventures and the firm itself has been backed by major industry figures including Matt Clifford, the Entrepreneurs First founder and key voice for AI in Downing Street.
“How do you engineer for those productive collisions and creative chaos that fuel real discovery? We got hooked by two aspects of their answer,” said Index Ventures in a blog post announcing its support of Inherent.
“The first is the idea that AI-native science will look and feel totally different to the scientific method we’ve grown used to over the past 400 years: it will be messier, less legible, but capable of exceptional outcomes.
“If Inherent succeeds, their bet is that the lab of the future will be as alien to us today as a modern research facility would be to a medieval monk, accustomed to searching for astronomical data in the Bible.
“The second thing that struck us was Inherent’s commitment to ethics and governance. The whole team thinks deeply about the second and third-order consequences of their work, and have chosen to set up the company as a public benefit corporation.”
The Inherent founding team includes Tantum Collins, Edward Hughes and Louis Kirsch.
