Astut, an Oxford University spinout developing AI for unprecedented decision-making, has raised £1.6 million in seed funding to help businesses and institutions navigate crises and high-stakes challenges where no historical data exists.
The round was co-led by East X Ventures and Sure Valley Ventures (SVV), with participation from the UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund (UKI2S), managed by Future Planet Capital.
Founded in April this year by Professor Pete Grindrod CBE, a mathematician at the University of Oxford and founding trustee of the Alan Turing Institute, Astut’s breakthrough “Hybrid AI” technology is designed to make transparent, auditable decisions under conditions of uncertainty and limited precedent — areas where traditional AI models fail.
Astut’s technology addresses what it calls High-Stakes Unseen Decisions (HSUD) — scenarios where no prior case data exists. These might include responding to emerging crises, supply chain disruptions, or strategic one-off opportunities where outcomes have no comparable historical reference.
Based at the Culham Science Centre in Abingdon, Astut’s Hybrid AI combines two complementary layers: a logical reasoning engine built on symbolic AI principles, and a creative generative layer powered by large language models.
Together, these enable AI systems to generate and justify decision options, backed by reasoning that satisfies a defined set of hard and soft constraints — offering an explainable and auditable foundation for human decision-makers.
Professor Pete Grindrod, Astut’s founder and CEO, said: “Traditional AI breaks when faced with new, high-stakes situations without data. Astut gives organisations a way to make confident, transparent decisions when precedent doesn’t exist.
“This funding will allow us to strengthen our partnerships in defence, energy, retail and finance, and embed our technology into partner platforms so it can reach those who need it most. Our creative AI is radical — and it’s the start of what could become a sovereign capability for the UK.”
Sure Valley Ventures’ Managing Partner Barry Downes said the firm was backing Astut’s mission to bring explainable reasoning to AI in high-impact sectors: “Astut is redefining how enterprises apply AI to complex, high-stakes decisions. Pete and his team have built a reasoning engine purpose-built for environments where AI must justify and audit its outputs — a critical need for sectors like defence, energy, and retail.”
Rory Scott Russell, General Partner at East X Ventures, added: “In areas like decision support and explainable AI, current technologies — including GPTs and LLMs — often fail in unseen situations. Astut’s fusion of symbolic AI, machine learning and inverse reasoning is not only academically robust but commercially scalable.”
The funding coincides with the Government’s designation of Culham Campus — where Astut is based — as the UK’s first AI Growth Zone, designed to support sovereign AI infrastructure and private R&D investment.
Mark White, Investment Director at UKI2S, said Astut exemplified the UK’s deep-tech leadership: “We invest at the frontier of innovation, where uncertainty is not a risk but an opportunity. Astut’s technology brings clarity to high-stakes, data-sparse environments — exactly the kind of capability the UK must develop and protect.”
Despite being just six months old, Astut is already in talks with defence, energy and finance organisations, including the Ministry of Defence and partners in the UK’s fusion energy programme, to pilot its technology.
The company plans to commercialise its Hybrid AI via channel partnerships, embedding its reasoning systems within other platforms to support decision-making across multiple industries.
With the global market for explainable and auditable AI expanding rapidly, Astut’s approach — uniting mathematical logic with generative creativity — positions it at the intersection of innovation, ethics, and strategic autonomy.
