How Faculty navigated a complex acquisition with Ledgy as their single source of truth

about Faculty‍

Founded in 2014,  Faculty is one of Europe’s leading applied AI companies. Its PhD-heavy team of deep AI experts has delivered hundreds of real-world AI products to improve critical public services and drive sustained economic returns across every sector of the economy.Backed to Series A, Faculty was acquired by Accenture in March 2026. Their story is a practical case study in what it means to be transaction-ready: having the right equity infrastructure in place well before the moment it gets tested.

about Jack Stanley and Rebecca Welch

Jack Stanley is Faculty's Finance Director and was, alongside Becca Welch, Head of People, the primary owner of equity management at Faculty. Jack oversaw the cap table, investor reporting, and the financial mechanics of the equity programme. Becca led the operational side: issuing grants, managing documentation, and onboarding employees to their share plans.

‍Jack Stanley is Faculty's Finance Director and was, alongside Becca Welch, Head of People, the primary owner of equity management at Faculty. Jack oversaw the cap table, investor reporting, and the financial mechanics of the equity programme. Becca led the operational side: issuing grants, managing documentation, and onboarding employees to their share plans.

from spreadsheets to something that could actually scale

Faculty has been issuing equity since its early days. The process was more manual than they would have liked. Grants were issued on paper, tracked in spreadsheets, and later moved into a basic database product.

There was no employee-facing view, no document automation, and no way to manage buybacks at scale. Faculty had around 500 stakeholders and roughly 1,500 equity awards issued over Faculty's lifetime. Getting DocuSigns out, tracking which employees had signed, and keeping everything consolidated in one place had become a genuine operational problem. And with the prospect of future due diligence in mind, even if no deal was imminent at the time, Jack and Becca knew a proper platform was needed.

why Faculty chose Ledgy

Faculty evaluated a number of platforms, including Carta and Vestd, before settling on Ledgy. The deciding factor came down to a specific structural complexity. Most platforms struggled to represent Faculty’s structural arrangement cleanly.

"Ledgy demonstrated best that they could deal with that complexity, and were able to demo it and show exactly how it would work," says Jack. The fact that Ledgy is European, with a strong UK presence and genuine familiarity with UK share plan structures, also carried weight. So did the people. "Getting to know the team, it was clear they were like-minded, similar to how Faculty works. It was a good fit." The onboarding itself was straightforward once the data was ready.

how Faculty used Ledgy

Jack used Ledgy as the central record for Faculty's cap table, giving investors a real-time view of changes quarter by quarter. The ability to look at the cap table at any point in time, and to switch between different versions by adjusting dates, became particularly valuable later. But day-to-day, it was simply the confidence that the numbers coming out of a platform were reliable.

grants and document generation

Becca's use of Ledgy was focused on the operational side: issuing grants, generating documents, and getting them out to employees via DocuSign. Faculty ran a phased rollout using grant cycles to gradually bring people onto the platform. The shift in document generation alone was transformative. "That used to take my team days to get a grant done," says Becca. "Ledgy completely overhauled that. It's maybe quite small and quite boring and operational, but it made the world of difference and saved us so much time."

employee engagement

As employees gained access to Ledgy, word spread quickly. People were asking to be onboarded because colleagues had talked about how useful the platform was. Equity grants are complex financial instruments, and having a visual, interactive way to see a vesting schedule and understand how a grant worked made equity feel real rather than abstract.

navigating an acquisition in real time

In late 2025, Faculty entered acquisition discussions with Accenture. What followed was two months of intense due diligence in which Ledgy's role went from useful to essential.The value of being transaction-ready became immediately clear. The deal completed in March 2026.

the cap table under pressure

During due diligence, Faculty needed detailed cap table data and the ability to model what the buybacks would change. Jack used Ledgy to run future-dated transactions so he could switch between the current cap table and a projected version, all while keeping the live cap table anchored to what reconciled with Companies House.

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‍the documentation reality check

The acquisition also surfaced an important lesson about onboarding completeness. All the equity documentation Faculty had issued through Ledgy,was immediately retrievable and verifiable. "For the documents we had in Ledgy, it took about 25 minutes," says Jack. "Becca's advice to anyone going through a similar process: prioritise getting all historical documents into Ledgy as part of onboarding.

support when it counted most

Faculty were working under acquisition pressure they couldn't fully disclose to the Ledgy team.

Within hours of an email from Jack, Ledgy had their customer success team on a call, with the issue resolved in around 20 minutes, and a walkthrough video recorded for reference. The team remained on hand throughout, including taking calls remotely while on holiday. None of them knew the real urgency, but they helped anyway.

This kind of hands-on support, responsive, calm under pressure, and genuinely expert, is now formalised as part of Ledgy's Advanced Services offering. Faculty experienced it before the programme existed by name. For companies going through exits, funding rounds, or any other high-stakes equity event, it reflects what Ledgy's team is built to provide.

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the impact

Faculty's acquisition completed cleanly in March 2026.The equity documentation Ledgy held was retrievable, accurate, and audit-ready. The cap table modelling gave Faculty's CFO and their advisers the data they needed, when they needed it. The lesson Faculty takes from the experience is one any finance or people team preparing for growth should hear: becoming transaction-ready is not something you do when a deal is on the table. It's something you build towards, quietly, so that when the moment comes, the platform does the work.

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