Oxford Spin-Out Astut Raises €1.8M For Transparent, Reasoning-Based AI

The round was co-led by tech VC East X Ventures and AI specialist SVV (Sure Valley Ventures), with additional support from the 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.

Investment in AI startups across Europe has surged, with EU-Startups reporting a ~55% year-on-year increase in Q1 2025.

Astut’s focus on high-stakes unseen decision-making (HSUD), combining symbolic reasoning with generative AI, positions it in a growing sub-segment of explainable and trustworthy AI. Comparable startups include Switzerland’s Reshape Systems (€856k for risk-analysis AI), the UK’s Dragonfly (€3M for AI-driven decision-making), and larger rounds like Sweden’s EvoluteIQ (€44M for enterprise “agentic AI”) and Austria’s Optimuse (€4M for AI-driven engineering automation).

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The UK remains a strong hub, highlighted by Gradient Labs (London), which raised over €11M for autonomous-agent AI in regulated industries underscoring Europe’s leadership in AI focused 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 by Pete Grindrod CBE, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, Astut develops technology for transparent and auditable AI-driven decisions in scenarios with no historical precedent, high-impact consequences, and limited data conditions where conventional AI often fails.

These High-Stakes Unseen Decision (HSUD) challenges affect institutions and businesses navigating critical situations without prior data such as responding to unexpected disruptions, exploring unique opportunities or creating new operational 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 combines a creative, explorative, and logical layer with a generative AI layer built on a large language model. Together, these layers generate decision options along with supporting logical reasoning, ensuring proposals comply with a set of defined hard and soft constraints.

Culham Science Centre, managed by the UK Atomic Energy Authority, was designated in February as the first Government AI Growth Zone hubs for AI development and private investment. Astut 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.”

Launched only six months ago, Astut is already in discussions for pilot programs with organisations across critical sectors, including defence and security (with the UK Ministry of Defence), B2C retail, corporate strategy and management consultancies, the UK 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.”