Inherent, a London-based AI lab founded by alumni of Google DeepMind, claims its AI agent has surpassed much larger models from Anthropic and OpenAI—despite being significantly smaller. Among the many startups launched by DeepMind alumni, Inherent has flown under the radar so far. But while better-funded competitors have yet to reveal anything tangible, this London team is beginning to showcase what it has been working on. Just a few weeks after emerging from stealth mode with a $50 million seed round, the startup says its newly launched AI agent, Faraday, has beaten larger, more established models at a specific challenge: independently reproducing the findings of published scientific papers without being given the answers upfront.

That might sound like a clever trick, especially given Inherent’s far grander vision—building AI that can generate new scientific knowledge, not just validate existing results. But replicating papers is a common training exercise for human scientists as well, noted cofounder and chief scientist Edward Hughes. “Many PhD students actually start by doing this,” he said. “What was most interesting to us about this was not so much the result of beating those frontier agents—which of course we liked—but was actually the way we went about building this.”

Here’s what should grab an investor’s attention: compared to Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5—both far larger, frontier-scale systems—Faraday runs on a relatively compact model called Qwen 3.6, which has just 27 billion parameters. (In simple terms, "parameters" serve as a rough measure of a model’s size and, typically, its training costs as well.) Inherent also set a higher bar than simply getting the right answer. Beyond reproducing results, it wanted Faraday to show “research taste”—an intuition for which experiments are worth running and how to design them effectively.

Teaching something as subtle as taste is no easy task, which is where reinforcement learning comes into play. This training method rewards an AI system for good outcomes rather than laying out explicit rules to follow. Instead of training its agents mainly on the study of how science is conducted, Inherent relies on this reward-based approach, betting that it will generalize more effectively to its long-term goal of agents capable of contributing across a wide range of scientific fields. “We’re always guided by that north star of building an AI scientist agent and imbuing our agents with taste,” Hughes said.

That focus also shapes what Inherent chooses not to build. Rather than creating its own coding tool, the company had Faraday use OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 Codex instead—much like human scientists lean on existing software rather than building everything from scratch, according to the company. Inherent is also working to avoid building agents that simply tell users what they want to hear. Instead, Hughes said, the goal is modeled on his favorite kind of teammate—the one who comes back and says: “I got curious about this, and I went off and I did these experiments. What do you think of these results?”

That collaborative mindset extends to how Inherent operates as a company. Its dozen employees all work in person at an office in King’s Cross—the once-neglected London neighborhood that Google DeepMind’s presence helped transform into one of the world’s leading AI hubs. “We believe that London is the place to be,” Hughes said. He is optimistic about London’s concentration of AI talent, but he has also joined calls to end “garden leave”—a practice common in the U.K. that bars departing employees from joining or starting a rival company for months after resigning. It’s a restriction American researchers generally don’t face, giving U.S. startups a head start on hiring talent who’ve left previous roles.

Hughes eventually navigated that constraint and launched Inherent alongside two other DeepMind alumni and a fourth cofounder. The startup shows no signs of slowing down either. It plans to grow its team to “about 20 to 25” by the end of the year. Given its ambitions in world models as well, and with Demis Hassabis’s new role leaving some DeepMind staff unsettled, Inherent’s hiring push could make it an appealing destination for DeepMind employees considering a move. Pictured from left to right: Inherent co-founders Louis Kirsch, Kaloyan Aleksiev, Tantum Collins and Edward Hughes.