Accenture agreed to acquire Faculty, a London-based company that sells AI services and software, the consulting group said on 6 January 2026. Faculty's team of more than 400 data scientists, AI engineers and other staff will join Accenture's teams once the deal closes.
Accenture did not disclose the price. Tech.eu reported that financial details were not released, while ChannelLife and other outlets in the TechDay network described the deal as worth about $1 billion, without naming a source for the figure.
Marc Warner, Faculty's co-founder and chief executive, will stay on as Faculty's CEO and also become Accenture's chief technology officer, joining its Global Management Committee. Completion is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approval.
What Faculty built
Faculty was founded in 2014. It describes itself as an AI-native business and works on AI strategy, AI safety, and the design, build and implementation of AI systems for public and private sector clients in the UK and other markets.
Its best-known public project was the NHS Early Warning System, built during the Covid-19 pandemic and used daily by NHS Gold Command, according to Accenture. Faculty has worked with OpenAI and Anthropic on the safety of their models, and with the UK AI Security Institute on baseline safety assessments of general-purpose models.
It also sells a product, Faculty Frontier, which Accenture describes as an enterprise decision intelligence tool with simulation and optimisation features that links an organisation's data, AI models and business processes. Accenture and Faculty have used Frontier with Novartis on planning and running clinical trials. After the deal, Frontier will become part of Accenture's product suite.
“Our vision has always been a world in which safe AI delivers widespread benefits to humanity.”
Why Accenture is buying
Accenture has been a partner of Faculty since December 2023, when it became a preferred implementation partner for Frontier. Buying the company brings that product in-house along with a team that has worked on AI safety and evaluation for model developers and government.
Accenture also plans to take Faculty's Fellowship Program global, for its own staff and for clients. The programme places STEM PhD and master's graduates and postdoctoral researchers into jobs in industry.
"With Faculty, we will further accelerate our strategy to bring trusted, advanced AI to the heart of our clients' businesses," said Julie Sweet, Accenture's chair and chief executive. Manish Sharma, Accenture's chief strategy and services officer, said the company "bridges the best of technology and human ingenuity to maximize returns on AI investments."
The founder and the funding
Before founding Faculty, Warner was a research fellow in quantum physics at Harvard. He has served on the court of Imperial College London and was a member of the UK's AI Council, according to Accenture.
In the announcement, Warner said Faculty's aim had always been for safe AI to deliver broad benefits, and that the next step was to help clients reinvent their businesses with it. Sweet said she looked forward to his work shaping Accenture's technology vision and strategy as chief technology officer.
Faculty raised £30 million ($42.5 million) in growth funding from the Apax Digital Fund in 2021 and about £40 million (roughly $54 million) in total, Tech.eu reported. LocalGlobe is also an investor. ChannelLife reported that Faculty says it has quadrupled its revenue over the past four years; the company has not published revenue figures.
A large deal for UK AI
ChannelLife described the transaction as the largest purchase of a privately held British AI startup, based on the reported $1 billion value. Accenture, which says it has about 784,000 employees, did not disclose detailed integration plans or a closing date.
Sharma said combining with Faculty would give Accenture a strong base of talent for making AI work in practice for clients. The deal adds a specialist team of a few hundred people to a workforce in the hundreds of thousands, along with a software product that Accenture had already been implementing for clients as a preferred partner.
