Introduction:
CEO and co-founder Marc Warner talks about his plans for the company. Faculty seems to have perfected the art of acquiring UK government contracts. It helped Boris Johnson win the Vote Leave campaign and become a prime minister. It also helps clear up the mess that Brexit has made of the fishing industry. It also includes NHS problems and telling corporates like Red Bull to suggest to their customers. It continues to hoover up Ph.D. graduates at a rate of knots to work on its AI platform.
Statement from the Co-founder and CEO, Marc Warner:
During a call, Warner says that the company no longer plans to enter the political realm again: “Never again. It’s very controversial. I don’t want to make out that I think politics is unethical. Trying to make the world better, in whatever dimension you can, is a good thing …
But from our perspective, it was, you know, ‘noisy,’ and our goal as an organization, despite current appearances to the contrary, is not to spend tonnes of time talking about this stuff. We do believe this is an important technology that should be out there and should be in a broader set of hands than just the tech giants, who are already very good at it.”
Statement from Warner about the investment:
Talking about the investment he added: “Fundamentally, the money is about doubling down on the U.K. first and then international expansion. Over the last seven years or so we have learned what it takes to do important AI, impactful AI, at scale. And we just don’t think that there’s actually much of it out there.
Customers are rightly sometimes a bit skeptical, as there’s been hype around this stuff for years and years. We figured out a bunch of the real-world applications that go into making this work so that it actually delivers the value. And so, ultimately, the money is really just about being able to build out all of the pieces to do that incredibly well for our customers.”
How the headquarters will stay in the UK:
According to him, the Faculty would stay firmly HQ’d in the UK. It plans to reap the advantages of the talent pool available in the UK. “The U.K. is a wonderful place to do AI. It’s got brilliant universities, a very dynamic startup scene. It’s actually more diverse than San Francisco. There’s government, there’s finance, there are corporations, there’s less competition from the tech giants. There’s a bit more of a heterogeneous ecosystem.”
“There’s no sense in which we’re thinking, ‘Right, that’s it, we’re up and out!’. We love working here, we want to make things better. We’ve put an enormous amount of effort into trying to help organizations like the government and the NHS, but also a bunch of U.K. corporations in trying to embrace this technology, so that’s still going to be a terrifically important part of our business.”
That said, Faculty plans to expand abroad: “We’re going to start looking further afield as well, and take all of the lessons we’ve learned to the U.S., and then later Europe.”
