Faculty has become the first tech unicorn of 2026 after it was bought by Accenture in a deal worth more than $1 billion.
The London AI firm, which was founded in 2014 and has worked with Dublin-headquartered Accenture since December 2023, works with public and private sector clients to deploy AI solutions in the UK and other key markets.
When the transaction closes, Faculty’s 400 staff, including data scientists and AI engineers, will integrate with Accenture’s teams. In addition to his role as CEO of Faculty, co-founder Marc Warner will become CTO of Accenture and join the company’s global management committee.
While terms of the deal were not disclosed, Faculty investors Apax Digital and Mercuri said it made the company a unicorn.
“Quadrupling revenues in four years, launching a successful AI software offering and becoming a unicorn – this is a great outcome for Faculty and showcases the strength of the UK’s AI ecosystem,” said Mark Beith, partner at Apax Digital.
Alan Hudson, partner at Mercuri, wrote on LinkedIn that Faculty was “the first UK tech unicorn of 2026”.
In three months last year Accenture cut 11,000 staff in a restructure with CEO and chair Julie Sweet warning that the figure would grow if staff did not retrain for AI. Its 800,000 employees are now referred to as ‘reinventors’ amid the pivot to AI advice.
“With Faculty, we will further accelerate our strategy to bring trusted, advanced AI to the heart of our clients’ businesses,” said Sweet in announcing the deal. “I’m pleased to welcome the Faculty team to Accenture and look forward to Marc’s contribution shaping our technology vision and strategy as chief technology officer.”
Faculty’s services include AI strategy, AI safety, and the design, build and implementation of high-performance AI systems. It works with some of the world’s leading AI labs, including OpenAI and Anthropic, to ensure that AI models are safe, as well as with the UK AI Security Institute and other organisations to make baseline safety assessments of general-purpose models.
Faculty Frontier, Faculty’s enterprise decision intelligence product, will join Accenture’s suite of products. For example, Accenture and Faculty are already working together to support leading life sciences companies, such as Novartis, to use Frontier to transform the economics of clinical trial planning and execution.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Faculty built the NHS’s Early Warning System. This was used daily by NHS Gold Command to accurately predict patient demand across the country, and to optimally allocate critical care resources to where they were needed most.
Formerly known as Advanced Skills Initiative, it reported a 29% rise in revenues to £41.7 million for the 12 months to March 2025, with a pre-tax loss of £3.8m.
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Before founding Faculty, Warner was a research fellow in quantum physics at Harvard and served on the court of Imperial College London and as a member of the UK’s AI Council, an independent expert committee that provides advice to government and high-level leadership of the AI ecosystem.
Warner said: “Our vision has always been a world in which safe AI delivers widespread benefits to humanity. We have spent the last ten years supporting our clients to bring this world about, step by step.
“As AI advances rapidly, the ambition of our clients is now, rightly, no less than the reinvention of their business. I am delighted that by teaming up with Accenture, we have everything in place to support AI transformation from start to finish.”
Completion of the acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, including required regulatory approval.