From seed to unicorn: backing faculty ai

Faculty AI co-founders Marc Warner, Angie Ma and Andrew Brookes

This month we are proud to celebrate the acquisition of Faculty AI by Accenture, marking the end of one chapter and the beginning of another for one of Europe’s most respected AI companies, and the first unicorn of 2026.

We first backed Faculty in their Seed round in 2019 driven by a conviction that their vision, team and product DNA positioned them to become foundational infrastructure in the age of enterprise AI. Today we reflect on what made that conviction so strong and why Faculty’s journey to unicorn status offers a model for how to build enduring value in the most transformative technology category of our time.

1. Talent as a strategic, compounding advantage 

From day one Faculty’s founding team stood out. Talented, multi-disciplinary and deeply thoughtful, they combined academic rigour with commercial acumen. But they also did something that most startups overlook: they embedded talent strategy into the core of the business model. 

Through the Faculty Fellowship programme they created a world-class academy that trained and absorbed top tier AI talent into their business and commercial relationships, building a flywheel that fuelled their own growth as well as the UK’s broader AI ecosystem. With a 400-strong team of PhDs, they grew to one of the strongest AI teams in Europe. In a market where access to top ML talent is becoming increasingly challenging, Faculty had a distinct advantage. In our view this was as strategic as any product and commercial decision.

2. Safety and responsibility by default

Faculty was also early and unusually serious in its commitment to safe, responsible AI deployment. The founders recognised well before it became standard practice, and well before recent GenAI advancements made it common knowledge, that long-term success would depend on building systematic that could be trusted. That meant designing for explainability, fairness, privacy and rigour from the start and applying those principles in practice across sectors and clients. 

Its work on national programmes for the NHS, for example, including the Early Warning System deployed during the COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrated how AI could be applied responsibly at national scale, informing critical decisions in real-world circumstances. Similarly Faculty also closely engaged with the UK’s AI Safety Institute, while also collaborating with leading frontier model developers including OpenAI, Anthropic and Mistral, highlighting its role as both a trusted implementer and a credible leader within the global AI ecosystem. 

3. Flexible commercial model

Faculty’s impact extended across sectors including healthcare, defence, finance, education, media and energy, often working on high stakes problems where AI failure is not an option. A major contributor to this success was the company’s model of combining consultancy with a scalable software offering. 

The company’s Frontier platform, designed to connect data, models and business processes, enabled clients to build decision intelligence systems that could evolve over time. This hybrid structure allowed Faculty to meet enterprises at different levels of AI maturity, supporting adoption early while laying the groundwork for long term platform integration. 

This commercial model proved resilient and adaptable, delivering material value and embedding within customer strategy as their AI deployments matured. As global investment in AI continues to accelerate, with the market expected to reach almost $2 trillion by the early 2030s (Grand View Research), Faculty’s trajectory offers a blueprint for what it takes to build enduring value. 

4. Mercuri’s thesis

Faculty’s value proposition sits squarely within Mercuri’s core investment thesis: that AI is not simply a creative or productivity tool, but a transformation layer reshaping how organisations generate, structure and act on information. We believe that companies capable of embedding AI safely and scalably into their workflow will define the next era of enterprise software, and in particular the media value chain. 

Faculty’s responsibility-first approach also aligned precisely with our conviction that a safe foundation is essential for long term enterprise success in a media-rich, AI-enabled economy. It was also an early signal that the most enduring companies would be those that bridged the gap between breakthrough capability and real-world pragmatic implementation. 

A strategic milestone for UK AI

Accenture’s acquisition of Faculty AI is a signal of where enterprise AI is consolidating. Faculty Frontier will integrate in Accenture’s global offering, expanding its reach across industries and geographies. Marc Warner’s move into a senior technology leadership role at Accenture further underscores the importance of grounded technical leadership in shaping responsible enterprise AI rollout. 

The acquisition also marks a moment of maturity for the UK’s AI ecosystem. Faculty’s journey reminds us that value does not only lie in foundation model development, but also on strategically important companies that translate AI advances into usable and trustworthy systems. 

Being part of Faculty’s trajectory from seed to unicorn has been a privilege. Congratulations to the entire Faculty team on an extraordinary journey - we are excited to see how the next chapter unfolds.