From school-leaver apprenticeships to the AI skills gap, how Multiverse's story became bigger than its founding promise
Euan Blair keeps a different coloured Multiverse jumper for every day of the week, it’s really a small thing, he says, but it's one less decision to make before nine o'clock. He also wears an Oura ring to track his sleep, and his desk, by his own admission, is arranged with something close to obsession.
Now, none of it reads like the habits of a Prime Minister's son coasting on his surname, it actually reads like someone who has spent a decade building a company the hard way, and is still counting the variables he can control.
That company is Multiverse, the apprenticeships-and-upskilling platform Blair co-founded with Sophie Adelman in 2016.
The Euan Blair Multiverse growth story doesn't end with a valuation headline, however, it has since been valued at $2.1 billion, survived two rounds of painful layoffs, quietly dropped the mission it was built on, and become one of the loudest corporate voices shaping the UK's Growth and Skills Levy. It is, depending on who you ask, either a genuine British success story or a cautionary tale about what happens when growth outpaces purpose.
We think it's probably both, and that's what makes it worth telling properly.
The Euan Blair Multiverse funding story: from WhiteHat to unicorn
Blair studied Ancient History at Bristol, then international relations at Yale, then spent a stretch working congressional committees in Washington before Morgan Stanley and a stint running Sarina Russo Group, an Australian training and employment firm with more than 1,500 staff. It's the line on his CV people tend to skip past, but it's arguably the one that mattered most: by the time he and Adelman launched WhiteHat in 2016, Blair had already run a training business at scale.
WhiteHat's original pitch was simple. Match school leavers who hadn't gone to university with tech-apprenticeship placements at real employers, and prove the model could rival a degree. The company rebranded to Multiverse in 2021, the same year it raised £97 million from investors including D1 Capital Partners and BOND. By June 2022 it had raised a further £163 million at a $1.7 billion valuation, becoming the UK's first edtech unicorn.
“Mandating degrees, and making admissions officers the gatekeepers for great careers, means leaving out thousands of talented individuals.”— Euan Blair, founder & CEO, Multiverse
The Euan Blair Multiverse pivot, and the reckoning
Growth wasn't a straight line.
By late 2023, Multiverse had cut nearly a third of its US team after missing revenue targets, a decision Blair called, in a note to staff, the toughest he'd made. More redundancies followed: Companies House filings for the year to March 2025 show 55 payments for loss of office, headcount slipping from 822 to 813, and a pre-tax loss that widened to £63.3 million even as revenue climbed more than a third to just under £80 million.
Somewhere in that period, the original mission quietly changed shape too. Multiverse's early promise, getting school leavers into first jobs without a degree, has given way to something broader and more corporate: upskilling existing employees, increasingly around AI. Blair doesn't dispute the shift. Speaking to City A.M. about the tension between growth and consistency, he was candid about what scale actually costs.
“It is much easier to ensure complete and utter consistency... when you're dealing with 100 apprentices versus 10,000 apprentices.”— Euan Blair, City A.M., 2023
The company's own reporting on apprentice completion rates has drawn scrutiny too. Department for Education figures released this year put Multiverse's completion rate at 52.6%, against a sector average of 65.4%, a gap that sits uneasily next to a company built to prove apprenticeships work.
The Euan Blair Multiverse bet on the AI skills gap
What hasn't changed is Blair's read on where the opportunity sits. The Euan Blair Multiverse pitch now frames itself less as an alternative to university and more as the platform helping British employers close the AI skills gap, the widening distance between what companies are buying in AI tools and what their workforces actually know how to do with them. It's a reframing that happens to track almost exactly with where government policy has moved.
Multiverse gave written evidence to the parliamentary committee shaping the UK apprenticeship levy reform, welcoming the shift toward the Growth and Skills Levy as a way to let employers spend training funds more flexibly, provided the system stays employer-led. When the government agreed to cut the statutory minimum apprenticeship length and relax English and maths requirements for adult learners, Blair was quick to say so publicly.
Read our full breakdown of what the Growth and Skills Levy means for employers in practice, and how firms like Multiverse are already positioning around it.
In 2025, the company committed to training 15,000 new AI apprentices within two years, funded through the Levy, with partners including Visa, Capita, and Legal & General. It's a big number, delivered with Blair's usual confidence.
“Our commitment to 15,000 AI apprenticeships is a bold declaration that AI skills must be for everyone, at every stage of their career.”— Euan Blair, 2025
What the numbers don't quite settle
Blair was awarded an MBE for services to education in 2022, the same year Multiverse turned unicorn. Sunday Times Rich List estimates of Euan Blair net worth put the figure at around £375 million, tied almost entirely to a Multiverse shareholding that, on paper, has grown considerably since.
In May 2026, the company raised a further £52 million led by Schroders Capital, pushing its valuation to $2.1 billion and recording, for the first time, a cash-positive quarter.
None of that resolves the more interesting question sitting underneath the numbers: whether Multiverse, in becoming a platform for the AI skills gap, is still the company Blair and Adelman set out to build, or whether that company quietly stopped existing somewhere around 2023.
That's the real shape of the Euan Blair Multiverse pivot: the same company, a very different promise. Blair's own answer is that businesses evolve or they don't survive.
Whether that's a strength or a retreat probably depends on which version of Multiverse you believed in first.
What we'd still like to ask
We'd like to put the completion-rate figures to Blair directly and ask what the original WhiteHat mission means to him now that it's no longer the company's headline story. We'd also like to understand how Multiverse squares its Growth and Skills Levy advocacy with being one of the levy's largest single beneficiaries.
Editorial Note
This piece draws entirely on public reporting, company statements and Companies House filings.
If anyone from Multiverse would like to respond, add context, we'd welcome it, please get in touch at [email protected].
Sources: Companies House filings for Multiverse Group Limited; Multiverse's own funding announcements; reporting from Sifted, City A.M., the Financial Times, the New Statesman, UKTN and the Telegraph; Wikipedia's entry on Multiverse (company); written evidence submitted by Multiverse to the UK Parliament's education select committee; and Department for Education apprenticeship completion statistics.
