Astut hits its first birthday! Read our story so far
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The Astut Hypothesis Engine® is live!

Explorative AI for high-stakes, unprecedented decision making.

Helping leaders and strategists discover paths through challenges that have no playbook.

Discover Explorative AI

High-stakes decision making

The decisions that matter most are those that have never been faced before.

Leaders and boards carry more unprecedented decisions than ever. When the future no longer resembles the past, experience stops being enough. There is no data on a decision that has never been made. Nothing that learns from the past can help you make it.

A decision without precedent can still be explored. Within the space of possibilities, Astut Explorative AI® discovers options nobody has seen.

Our Product

The Astut Hypothesis Engine® is built to tackle unprecedented challenges.

Nothing is decided for you. A wealth of viable options to compare, weigh and choose from. The decision stays in your hands.

01.Define

Build the context that shapes your problem.

Describe the decision you're facing in your own words. A short conversation turns it into a structured problem.

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Import your own context. Attach internal documents to bring in what only your organization knows.

Set the shape of an option. Define the output every option should carry. Every option generated arrives in that same form, ready to compare.

02.Explore

Discover novel options others may never think to propose.

Astut Explorative AI® starts with known options and then utilises novelty search to explore widely. It expands the frontier of the decision space into the unknown.

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Novelty is the objective. The search rewards what is new. It goes wherever novelty leads, and that is how it discovers options no person or model would have proposed.

An archive of options. Every option generated goes into the archive, hundreds or thousands of them, and the whole archive is yours to explore.

03.Refine

Apply your rules to find what's possible.

Find concepts that give high-level summaries over your archive. Use built-in tools to choose constraints and apply them to filter hundreds of options down to the few you can put forwards.

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Concepts summarise the archive. Similar options are grouped into concepts, each one a distinct strategic direction, so hundreds of options read as a handful of real choices.

Change the constraints, change the view. Every constraint can be easily applied. Relax one and the options it excluded reappear, showing what's possible from a new perspective and surfacing approaches that were hidden before.

Plot, filter, compare. Work with the archive using built-in tools. Plot options on scatter and cross plots, filter by any criteria, and trade-offs are surfaced as a frontier you can read at a glance.

04.Present

Answer the challenge from your perspective.

Gather your chosen options into a collection, along with the reasoning behind them. This is the case you take to everyone else involved in the decision.

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Export in multiple formats. The document contains every option in full, so your perspective can be shared outside the app.

Bring novel ideas to the table. Use the App to bring greater diversity into your decision-making. Move beyond the ideas and biases your team might share.

What tough decision are you facing?

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Astut Explorative AI®

We’ve created a new category of artificial intelligence. Astut Explorative AI® is designed to explore what has never been done. It does not optimise or predict.

Exploration comes first.

Before you can predict or optimise, you must first explore what is possible. Astut are pioneers of Explorative AI. We are empowering leaders to navigate unprecedented challenges and make high-stakes decisions with total confidence.

Humans decide.

While mainstream AI focuses on opaque prediction, optimisation and automation, Explorative AI systematically discovers what is possible. Its role is to broaden strategic choice, not to replace decision makers or surface optimality.

We are mathematicians, scientists and engineers.

Astut is a University of Oxford spin-out that emerged from the convergence of Professor Pete Grindrod's scientific vision and the creativity of a small, founding group of engineers.

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Industries

Embedded where decisions are made.

Astut works through channel partners and with selected flagship organizations. Consultancies, technology providers and systems integrators embed the Astut Hypothesis Engine® into their own products and services.

  • Systematically explore thousands of strategic choices resulting from wide and wise explorations of structured scenarios for end-client engagements. Avoid groupthink and move beyond standard whiteboarding and brainstorming. Provide regulatory and board-level assurance that every possible avenue has been investigated.

  • Astut Explorative AI® can be applied broadly. Go beyond standard threat lists. Discover and evaluate novel, unprecedented cyber attack scenarios before they manifest in the real world. Build out strategies for consideration in red-teaming exercises.

  • Uncover hidden whitespace opportunities. Build extensively grounded, highly differentiated shortlists of investment strategies, targets and market adjacencies. Explore exposure to various unprecedented scenarios and options to mitigate against them.

  • Look beyond business-as-usual transaction data. Bring new substantiated ideas into your corporate strategy. Navigate complex, unprecedented market disruptions. Devise non-obvious pivots and strategic responses to both customer-facing and supply chain challenges.

  • Design robust strategies for an uncertain world in data-poor environments. Rapidly evaluate responses to high stakes unprecedented adversarial threats while applying strict operational and legal constraints.

  • Explore novel configurations and operating strategies. Plan the transition where past performance is no guide at all.

  • Drive market growth through compliant innovation. Convert complex corporate policies and regulatory rules into logical constraints to automatically map out novel, fully validated service initiatives. Discover unique, novel responses to global events and regulatory regime changes.

  • Find workable routes through competing mandates. Explore policy options that survive every constraint they must answer to.

  • Price and structure risks with no historical parallel. Reason about exposures for which no loss data exists.

  • Find formats and strategies the market has not tried. Get ahead of audiences that stopped behaving like their data.

Explore the unknown

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News from Astut

Great start to 2026 for Astut

Astut have made the PreSeed Now “Exciting Start-Ups” Shortlist for January 2026.

20 JAN 2026

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The Astut Story So Far

Happy Birthday to us! As Astut hits its first birthday we share our story so far

08 SEPT 2026

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Soma Technologies become channel partners

Astut is pleased to announce that Soma Technologies has signed as a tier one channel partner. They will be taking Astut Explorative AI® to market across their network.

22 JUL 2026

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In the press: PreSeed Now · Digital Leaders · TFN · Business Matters · Soapbox