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Accenture has agreed to buy artificial intelligence company Faculty in a deal valuing the UK start-up at more than $1bn, as the consulting group attempts to adapt to disruption from AI.

The New York-listed consultancy said on Tuesday it had agreed to buy London-based Faculty, whose chief executive has worked closely with the UK government and will become Accenture’s chief technology officer.

Accenture said acquiring Faculty, which has more than 400 staff, would improve its ability to help clients “reinvent core and critical business processes” by adopting AI.

The companies did not disclose the terms of the transaction, but two of Faculty’s investors, Apax Digital and Mercuri, said that the deal granted the company “unicorn” status, shorthand for private tech companies valued at more than $1bn (£740mn).

“Quadrupling revenues in four years, launching a successful AI software offering and becoming a unicorn — this is a great outcome for Faculty and showcases the strength of the UK’s AI ecosystem,” said Mark Beith, partner at Apax Digital.

Alan Hudson, partner at Mercuri, hailed Faculty as “the first UK tech unicorn of 2026” in a LinkedIn post.

Three people with knowledge of the deal said it attached a £600mn valuation to the stakes held by Faculty’s venture backers, multiple times the company’s enterprise value when it last raised capital in 2021. That figure excludes the value of shares held by Faculty’s staff and other payments to the start-up’s employees, said people familiar with the matter.

The takeover is the largest-ever acquisition of a privately held UK AI start-up, according to Dealroom, which tracks such deals.

Faculty, which employs people with science PhDs, data scientists and AI engineers, is the latest in a series of British start-ups to be bought by a US group as the UK battles to provide a vibrant capital market to help promising companies to grow.

The deal comes as consultancies overhaul their business models, with AI forcing them to shift away from their traditional pyramid set-up in which a relatively small number of senior consultants oversee armies of junior analysts.

Consultancies are also being forced to buy or build AI expertise as they spend less time on traditional strategy advice and more on helping companies adopt the technology.

Accenture has struggled to adapt to a sector-wide slowdown for consultants. Its market capitalisation has slid to about $160bn after peaking at more than $260bn during a boom in demand following the Covid-19 pandemic.

The firm cut its global workforce by more than 11,000 in the three months to the end of August, while chief executive Julie Sweet warned that more staff could leave if they did not retrain for AI amid an $865mn restructuring.

Accenture has rebranded its almost 800,000 employees as “reinventors” as part of a pivot to offering advice on how to adapt to AI-driven disruption.

Faculty’s chief executive Marc Warner, previously a member of the AI Council that advised the UK government, will join Accenture’s global management committee.

Faculty was founded in 2014, long before the current AI mania, by physics researchers Warner and Angie Ma, alongside Andrew Brookes, a former software engineer at BlackRock and Ocado.

The start-up — previously named Advanced Skills Initiative — has raised more than £40mn from investors, including Apax Digital Fund, LocalGlobe and Mercuri.

It reported a 29 per cent rise in revenues to £41.7mn for the 12 months to March 2025 and a pre-tax loss of £3.8mn.

Faculty and Accenture have partnered since 2023, with the consultancy helping to implement the AI group’s products for clients such as pharmaceuticals group Novartis, including data dashboards that help companies’ decision-making.

Faculty is perhaps best known for its work in the UK public sector. Soon after Covid started to spread rapidly in the UK in 2020, Faculty worked alongside US tech companies, including Palantir, to build a data platform to help officials co-ordinate their response to the pandemic, including the NHS’s Covid “early warning system”.

More recently, it has worked on the UK’s AI safety and security programme, testing the safeguards of the latest large language models.

Accenture and Faculty declined to comment on the value of the deal.