Astronomical AI

29/04/2026

Our CEO Femma Ashraf was invited back to the digital4health UK Open Innovation event by Joanne Bekis CMgr MCMI for a fireside chat as part of and to share our successes to date since winning best pitch in October.

Adam Ashraf and Zane Ashraf were also in attendance. It was a wonderful experience to reconnect with the team including Robert Reisel Lewis Stringer Mirjana Prokic and Martin Sandhu and great to see so many amazing pitches and startup.

27/04/2026

At Astronomical AI, we’re committed to building AI that is not only innovative, but ethical, inclusive, and grounded in real-world impact.

Our Founder, Femma A., recently spoke at Justice In Therapy: Decolonising The Curriculum hosted by Black Psychotherapy, sharing insights on AI, bias, and the future of psychotherapy training, including the development of an agentic AI tool designed to support safe and inclusive practice.

She’s written a personal reflection on the experience, the importance of this work, and what comes next. Thanks to Zane Ashraf for accompanying her.

Read the full blog here: https://femma.co.uk/ai/justice-in-therapy-decolonising-the-curriculum-conference-experience/

On Saturday 26th April 2026 I attended the Justice In Therapy: Decolonising The Curriculum organised by the amazing organisation that is Black Psychotherapy.

20/04/2026

Only 5 days to go before our CEO Femma Ashraf presents her talk on Talking with Machines: Making Sense of AI, Bias and Psychotherapy at the blackpsychotherapy conference.

The conference is now sold out, but there is a waitlist: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/justice-in-therapy-decolonising-the-curriculum-tickets-1985830086245

She also did a long form webinar for IARTA which can be purchased here for £24 https://www.relationalta.com/talking-with-machines-making-sense-of-ai-bias-and-psychotherapy-femma-ashraf/

13/04/2026

Only a few days to go before our CEO Femma Ashraf presents her EATA - European Association for Transactional Analysis webinar on Talking with Machines: Making Sense of AI, Bias and Psychotherapy.

It's free to attend and you can book your spot here: https://eatanews.org/ta-ai-and-human/

A long form webinar that she did for IARTA which can be purchased here for £24 https://www.relationalta.com/talking-with-machines-making-sense-of-ai-bias-and-psychotherapy-femma-ashraf/

25/03/2026

Amazing to see Christina Tueje and Zahra Shah speaking at the Women in AI panel 🙂

23/03/2026

The UK government is launching a £500 million Sovereign AI Fund next month. As someone who has spent over twenty years building in AI and technology in this country, I find myself genuinely hopeful about what this could mean.

But I also think it is worth being honest about what success looks like.

Right now, vast sums of public money flow to large foreign technology companies to run critical British infrastructure. Palantir holds a £330 million NHS contract. The governance and sovereignty questions that raises deserve a much bigger public conversation than they are currently getting.

Meanwhile, the diverse founders who are quietly trying to build British AI face a very different funding reality. Women founders receive around 2% of venture capital in the UK. For South Asian and other minority founders, it is lower still. I know this not just from the data, but from lived experience building Astronomical AI.

So my hope for the Sovereign AI Fund is this: that it prioritises small and medium British enterprises, not just large incumbents. That it actively works to redress the balance for female and ethnic minority founders. And that it resists the pull toward monopoly, backing a genuinely diverse ecosystem of builders rather than concentrating resource in a handful of already powerful players.

I have written about the broader picture on the Astronomical AI blog: https://astronomicalai.com/why-britain-needs-its-own-ai

Would love to hear from others thinking about what British AI sovereignty should really look like.

Femma Ashraf - CEO

Why Britain Needs Its Own AIby astronomicalai Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming the infrastructure that modern societies run on. It shapes how healthcare systems operate, how public services are delivered, and increasingly how decisions about people’s lives are made. Yet in the UK, most ...

08/03/2026

🌟 This International Women's Day, we celebrate the women driving breakthroughs in AI, medicine, and beyond. At Astronomical AI, we're on a mission to save lives through smarter lung cancer detection and the brilliant women on our team are at the heart of that mission. Here's to the scientists, innovators, and trailblazers rewriting what's possible. 💙

28/02/2026

So proud of our CEO and of course she will incorporate AI in all the work she does, we expect nothing less 🙂

Yesterday I presented my Trauma Processing Model at the Metanoia Staff–Student Conference. This piece of work began not as a formal research project, but in my own therapy.

23/02/2026

Cancer survival in the UK is at a pivotal moment.
The government has set out ambitious plans to improve early diagnosis, speed up treatment, and invest in new technology with the aim of boosting five-year cancer survival rates by 2035.
Early diagnosis, particularly for lung cancer, will be key. At Astronomical AI, we’re focused on how AI can support faster, more accurate diagnosis and better outcomes for patients.
Read the full blog written by Zane (product manager) to learn more 👇

https://astronomicalai.com/government-sets-out-ambitious-plans-to-improve-cancer-survival-rates

13/01/2026

had the privilege of attending a parliamentary panel on Unlocking the Future of UK Health and Life Sciences, hosted by UKAI and Curia tonight.

What stayed with her the most was how grounded the discussion was in reality. Clinical data is messy. Training and validating models takes time. Accuracy alone is not enough if systems create false alerts that burden already stretched clinicians, particularly resident doctors. Over and over again, the conversation came back to safety.

Key reflections from the session:

AI in healthcare must be designed with humans firmly in the loop.
Clinical safety, GDPR, and governance are not barriers to innovation but prerequisites for trust.
End user experience matters just as much as model performance. If clinicians do not trust or understand the tool, adoption will fail.
Co creation with clinicians and partners who truly understand the use case is essential.
Safe sandbox environments are critical to test, validate, and iterate before real world deployment.

There was also a powerful policy discussion around NHS adoption. With each hospital operating as an independent legal entity, procurement remains fragmented. At present there is no single model for adoption, raising an important question for policymakers: what should be decided locally, and what must be coordinated nationally, if the UK is serious about scaling safe clinical AI?

Announcements like NHS Online and global signals such as the JP Morgan and ChatGPT health partnership show momentum. The UK has a real opportunity to lead AI into routine healthcare, but only if safety, clinical validity, and trust remain at the foundation.

For me, the key question remains simple and hard at the same time: how do we drive safety at scale while still enabling innovation?