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London-based Faculty is an applied artificial intelligence (AI) company that helps companies who have the scale, data and foresight to adopt AI into their organisations. It helps make AI real across society by providing a combination of strategy, software, and skills to its customers –  “everything needed to successfully create value from AI.”

Faculty raises growth fund

In a recent development, the British AI company announced that it has raised £30M (approx €34.7M) in a fresh round of funding. The round saw investment from Apax Digital Fund (ADF). Faculty reports this as the largest investment it has accepted to date. And with this round, the company has raised a total of £40M (approx €46.25M) in funding since its inception.

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Apax Digital partners with founders and leadership teams of innovative software, internet, and tech-enabled services companies worldwide to help them accelerate growth, drive transformational change, and unlock their maximum potential.

Mark Beith, Partner at Apax Digital, who will now join Faculty’s board of directors, says, “Faculty 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.”

Faculty’s existing investors include Guardian Media Group Ventures, LocalGlobe, and Jaan Tallinn – one of Skype’s founding engineers.

Faculty’s story

Founded in 2014 by Dr Marc Warner, Dr Angie Ma, and Andrew Brookes, Faculty supports any organisation to make AI effective and drive value.

The business started out with the fellowship to train and transition PhD and postdoc scientists into professional data scientists. Fellows would work on eight-week real world projects with a range of companies. “While collaborating with these companies, we were asked to work on bigger and bigger projects, so we developed our services to deliver professional data science strategy, software and skills training,” the company mentions on its website. 

“In 2016, recognising the need for bespoke software, we built the Faculty Platform to speed up AI deployment and increase the transparency and oversight over machine learning models.”

The company reports that it now has Europe’s most experienced team of AI and ML specialists, who are able to support any organisation to make AI real. Currently, Faculty’s specialist team includes over 50 PhDs with experience of working with over 230 customers globally.

Despite the pandemic, Faculty has sustained strong growth, onboarding 52 new customers in the last financial year, including the National Crime Agency, Red Bull, Virgin Media, Moonpig. Besides, it has also landed a two-year partnership with NHS England and NHS Improvement to help them to build forecasting capabilities and improve data-driven decision-making.

The company most recently made headlines for its critical work enabling the NHS to divert resources to areas worst affected by the pandemic ahead of time.

Funds for providing “AI-as-a-Service”

The raised capital will be used to drive the expansion of Faculty’s “AI-as-a-Service” model. The company believes that during this pandemic, its “AI as a Service” model can help companies optimise their marketing spend and forecast demands for consumer goods, predicting pressures on the healthcare system for both public and private sector organisations. It enables customers to customise powerful AI solutions to their needs, with the ongoing training and support that guarantees safe and high-performance AI over the long term.

In addition, the funds will also help accelerate Faculty’s international expansion. The company is already working across five continents and is seeing growing global customer demand for its customised AI solutions.

Creating 400 jobs

With the vision to deliver “AI as a Service”, Faculty will use the funds to continue to enhance its technology offering and claims, which in turn will create over 400 new jobs across its engineering, product, and delivery teams. 

Besides, the funds 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, says, “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.”