About

Will Faithfull presenting at Software Lancaster Talks

I'm Will. I'm an engineer first, CEO second. I co-founded ExaDev in 2013 with Francis Williams while we were both doing our PhDs at Bangor. We started in a bedroom with nothing but laptops and stubbornness, and grew it into a 17-strong technical accelerator, Google supplier, and serial startup practice operating across the UK, US, Australia and Germany.

ExaDev builds companies, not just software. We embed small, senior engineering teams directly into early-stage startups, acting as fractional CTOs, tech leads, and hands-on builders. No management overhead, no tech-adjacent roles. Engineers are the decision makers. Through our investment arm ExaCap, we take equity stakes to align our incentives with our clients' long-term success. The startups we've worked with have collectively raised over £77m.

I completed my PhD in Unsupervised Change Detection part-time over seven years while building the business. That experience taught me the value of quiet diligence over loud promises. Along the way I've worked as a developer, infrastructure engineer, data scientist, data engineer, machine learning engineer, and tech lead. I still can't make my mind up which I like most.

In the early days we built robotics control software for medical labs, patient record systems for the NHS, and I taught computer science at Bangor University on the side. More recently I've led data science and engineering at HMRC at petabyte scale, contributed to Google Labs, and worked on Sky's identity platform serving millions of concurrent connections. The common thread is that I like hard problems and I like building things that matter.

I also organise the tech community in Lancaster through Software Lancaster and Software Lancaster Talks, which ExaDev sponsors.

Get in touch

Drop me an email at [email protected] or find me on LinkedIn.