Astut, an Oxford University spin-out, lands €1.8 million round for transparent reasoning-based AI
Astut, an AI startup spun out of Oxford University mathematics research, today announces €1.8 million in Seed funding to commercialise its breakthrough technology that helps organisations navigate unprecedented crises where traditional AI systems fail due to lack of historical data.
The funding round was co-led by technology VC East X Ventures and specialist AI VC firm SVV (Sure Valley Ventures), with contribution from UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund (UKI2S), managed by Future Planet Capital.
Pete Grindrod, Astut’s Founder and CEO said: “Astut has assembled a first-class development team and the funding will allow it to further develop its strategic stakeholders and channel partners within different sectors. The technology will go to market via those channel partners, becoming embedded within their own products and services to benefit their end-customers facing HSUD challenges.
Across the continent, investment in AI startups has risen sharply – with EU-Startups reporting a ~55 % year-on-year increase in Q1 2025.
Within this landscape, Astut’s focus on high-stakes unseen decision-making (HSUD) and its combination of symbolic reasoning and generative AI places it in an emerging sub-segment of explainable and trustworthy AI. This aligns it with startups such as Reshape Systems (Switzerland), which raised €856k to develop risk-analysis AI for complex systems, and Dragonfly (UK), which secured €3 million to simplify AI-driven decision-making.
Astut also shares thematic ground with larger rounds, such as EvoluteIQ’s €44 million raise in Sweden for “agentic AI” at enterprise scale, and Optimuse’s €4 million Seed round in Austria for AI-driven engineering automation.
Notably, the UK remains active in this space – Gradient Labs (London) raised €11 million+ for its autonomous-agent AI in regulated industries. Together, these deals show that the UK continues to be a leading hub for AI startups focusing on reasoning, explainability, and decision support.
“But this is only the beginning. In the future, Astut will develop further technologies that address intelligent and creative abilities of the human brain that current AI paradigms cannot emulate. Our creative AI is radical and will become a Sovereign competence for the UK,” added Grindrod
Founded in April this year by Pete Grindrod CBE, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, Astut’s technology looks to address the need for transparent and auditable AI-driven decisions in situations with no historical precedent, high-impact consequences, and limited data – all conditions under which current AI methods fail.
These High Stakes Unseen Decision (HSUD) challenges are faced by a range of institutions and corporates in business-critical situations when there is no previous case data – such as reacting to unexpected or urgent disruptions, exploring one-off opportunities, or developing new practices.
Barry Downes, Managing Partner at SVV commented: “We’re delighted to support Astut as it advances explainable AI for high-stakes decision-making in sectors like defence, energy and retail. Pete and David have developed a reasoning engine purpose-built for complex environments where AI must justify and audit its decisions. In a world where AI outputs often lack transparency or logic, Astut is redefining how enterprises and institutions apply reasoning-based AI to critical decisions.”
Based at the Culham Science Centre in Abingdon, Astut’s Hybrid AI consists of a creative, explorative, and logical AI layer sitting on top of a large language model, generative AI layer. These twin elements generate proposed decision options, together with their supporting logical reasoning, which cannot be refuted by any of a given set of various hard and soft constraints.
Culham Campus, owned and managed by the UK Atomic Energy Authority, was designated in February this year as the first of the Government’s AI Growth Zones: dedicated hotbeds for developing AI infrastructure and attracting new private investment. Astus is the Growth Zone’s inaugural AI company.
Rory Scott Russell, General Partner at East X Ventures, said: “In the areas of explainable AI and automation for decision support, current technologies (including GPTs and LLMs) face multiple problems that are impeding their uptake in industry, despite significant market pull. This is particularly apparent in applying AI in high stakes ‘unseen’ decision-making. This is a high-value, but hard-to-solve, use case with multiple highly defensible business models to deploy.
“We are particularly excited about Astut’s combination of symbolic AI and machine learning/LLM technology combined with inverse reasoning. This approach has been developed from decades of leading research and the founding team’s experience in successfully deploying statistical and automation technologies in industry.”
Despite launching just six months ago, Astut is in discussions about pilot programmes with companies in critical sectors such as defence and security (including the Ministry of Defence), business-to-consumer retail, corporate strategy and management consultancies, the UK’s fusion energy programme, and financial, risk and investment firms.
Mark White, Investment Director at UKI2S, added: “As a fund, we invest at the very frontier of innovation – where uncertainty isn’t a risk, but the spark for discovery and transformation. Whether it’s defence, BioTech, or fusion energy, we see immense potential for Astut’s technology to bring clarity and confidence to decision-making in complex, high-stakes environments.
“Astut’s approach to combining symbolic reasoning with generative AI directly aligns with the kind of sovereign capabilities the UK needs to develop and protect. We’re excited about how this could support our partners across UKAEA, MOD and beyond, where unseen challenges demand new kinds of intelligent, explainable AI.”
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