  We study whether the hinted 750 GeV resonance at the LHC can be a
Coleman-Weinberg inflaton which is non-minimally coupled to gravity. Since the
inflaton must couple to new charged and coloured states to reproduce the LHC
diphoton signature, the same interaction can generate its effective potential
and trigger the electroweak symmetry breaking via the portal coupling to the
Higgs boson. This inflationary scenario predicts a lower bound on the
tensor-to-scalar ratio of $r\gtrsim 0.006$, where the minimal value corresponds
to the measured spectral index $n_s\simeq0.97$. However, we find that the
compatibility with the LHC diphoton signal requires exotic new physics at
energy scales accessible at the LHC. We study and quantify the properties of
the predicted exotic particles.
