Faculty, a leading AI startup from London, helps organisations that have the scale, data, and foresight to adopt AI into their business. Now, the company announced that it has raised £30 million in growth funding.
International expansion of its model
The investment came from the Apax Digital Fund (ADF) alongside Faculty’s existing investors, including Guardian Media Group Ventures, LocalGlobe, and Jaan Tallinn, one of Skype’s founding engineers. It is the largest investment pumped into the company and has taken its total investment to nearly £40 million.
Faculty will use the funds to drive the expansion of its pioneering “AI as a Service” model. Already, the firm is already working across five continents and is seeing growing global customer demand for its safe and customised AI solutions.
The investment will support the next phase of Faculty’s growth over the coming years. The company will continue to enhance its technology offering. Also, it expects to create over 400 new jobs across its engineering, product, and delivery teams. The investment will also be put towards the rollout of Faculty’s new learning and development programme that will sit at the centre of the business to help develop technical and commercial talent as the company scales.
Marc Warner, CEO & Co-Founder of Faculty, said: “It’s an incredibly exciting time for artificial intelligence, and for Faculty in particular. Too many organisations haven’t been able to realise the value of AI, because they haven’t had the tools to integrate it successfully into their business. Customers are rightly demanding high performance technology to unlock the power of data and maximise impact. Faculty can help elevate an organisation’s performance, whether this enables better operational decisions, or increasing ROI. Apax’s expertise and global network means we will continue to grow at pace, bringing the power of AI to even more customers, helping them to make effective, robust decisions with real-world impact.”
Mark Beith, Partner at Apax Digital, who joins Faculty’s board of directors, said: “Faculty is a world-leading AI company with cutting-edge technology, inspiring people and culture, and with phenomenal customer feedback. They enable customers to realise the tremendous value of AI quickly but responsibly, providing robust, fair and explainable AI, with advanced data privacy. We have seen the power and impact of their solutions first-hand, as a client, and are thrilled to partner with Marc, Angie, Andy and the team to support their global expansion.”
“AI as a Service” tool
Founded in 2014 by Marc Warner, Angie Ma and Andrew Brookes, Faculty has grown rapidly to become one of the world’s most experienced teams of AI and ML specialists. It helps companies optimise marketing spends and forecast demand for consumer goods more accurately. Also, it will be able to predict pressures on the healthcare system during a pandemic.
Faculty’s “AI as a Service” model can be applied to a broad range of problems for both public and private sector organisations. It enables customers to customise powerful AI solutions to their needs by providing training and support that guarantees safe and high-performance AI over the long term.
Growth during pandemic
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the company sustained strong growth winning 52 new customers in the last financial year including the National Crime Agency, Red Bull, Virgin Media, and Moonpig among others.
Last month, Faculty partnered with NHS England & NHS Improvement to help enhance NHS AI forecasting and predicting capabilities. The two-year partnership helps them to build forecasting capabilities and improve data-driven decision-making. As a result of the partnership, the learnings from COVID-19 data response will be used to help improve services as well as care delivery for patients.
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