Saul Klein says he decided to back them after about five minutes. What Marc Warner remembers saying in that room is stranger than any pitch. He told one of Britain's best-known seed investors that most PhDs were not suited to commercial work.
That was the point. In 2014 Warner, a physicist who had worked on quantum sensing as a Marie Curie Fellow at Harvard, set up something with a clumsy name: the Advanced Skills Initiative. It was not an AI company. It was a fellowship that took academics with doctorates and gave them about two months of real-world training, because, as the founders saw it, you cannot get a job without experience and you cannot get experience without a job.
Companies and government departments paid to take on fellows, and the fellows turned out to be good at it.
He built it with Angie Ma, a UCL physicist who had worked in applied optics, and Andy Brookes, the one founder without a PhD, who became the technical chief. The five-person founding team was heavy with physicists and computer scientists. Warner has said little in public about his childhood, and the sources I found offer no family story, so the human detail sits in the founding choice itself: they started by solving their own world's problem, the academic who cannot get hired.
What almost nobody connects to the Faculty of today is that origin. The fellows were not a side project. They were the product. Companies and government departments paid to take on fellows, and the fellows turned out to be good at it. In 2016 the business raised GBP1.5m, and ASI Data Science grew from training people into building models for clients.
Then came the part that made headlines for the wrong reasons. In 2019 the company was renamed Faculty, and in the same period it faced scrutiny over links to the Vote Leave campaign and payments from a company linked to Dominic Cummings. Critics questioned a non-competitive COVID contract with the Department of Health. The National Audit Office found no evidence that ministers influenced procurement, and Faculty has said it follows conflict-of-interest best practice. Even so, the early work with the Home Office on a terrorist-content blocking tool and at least GBP3m in government contracts between 2018 and 2020 left the firm explaining itself for years.
It kept building. In 2021 Apax Digital put in GBP30m, taking total funding to about GBP40m. In January 2026 Accenture agreed to buy Faculty for over GBP740m according to the Financial Times, and Warner was named Accenture's chief technology officer.
The lesson is easy to miss. Faculty's first customer was the problem its founders knew best. They did not start with a clever model. They started with a gap they had personally watched people fall into, and they charged to close it.