Euan Blair on his $2bn business, AI and apprenticeships

For a man forced to work from home with what could very possibly be Covid, if not a particularly nasty bout of man flu, Euan Blair is fizzing with energy.
The son of the former prime minister (who will always be described as such, no matter how successful he is in his business career) has inherited the sunny optimism and vibrancy of his father. But, while Tony, 71, has been no slouch when it comes to the wealth stakes, Euan, now 40 with two children of his own, has easily eclipsed him.
For, while his father famously said half of all Brits should get to university while he was prime minister, Euan took the view that, for many, apprenticeships were a better bet. In 2016, he set up a business to help young people, particularly from working-class backgrounds, to get apprenticeships with the kinds of companies that they might never normally consider, from Google to BP.
Now, having long since changed its name to Multiverse, the business is valued at about $2 billion, leaving Blair’s stake at a reputed $425 million.
“I’m sorry if I’m somewhat less effervescent than usual,” he apologised over the Zoom call, in his bunged up-nose voice, before proceeding to regale me — effervescently — with his vision for his company.
Multiverse, with revenues last year of £45 million and 800 employees in the UK and the United States, is growing up fast. Now, Blair enthuses, he is hiring Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho, the co-founder of Lastminute.com and a former Twitter director, to his board.
He’s also taking on a heavyweight new chief financial officer, Jillian Gillespie, who was part of the team that grew and floated MongoDB, the $20 billion US tech company.
That all sounds rather like a company making preparations to float on the stock market, I pointed out. Multiverse last raised money in 2022 in a series D fundraising round that valued the business at $1.7 billion and it has grown considerably since.
Asked about the prospects of an initial public offering, Blair gave what would be called, in the political world of his father, a “non-denial denial”, saying: “We have no immediate plans but we have assembled a really great team that have seen both public and private markets.”
Lane-Fox, 51, was a non-executive director at Twitter when it was taken over by Elon Musk in 2022 and sits on the board of Chanel, the luxury fashion house. She is president of the British Chambers of Commerce and has a decent pull in the tech investment world, should Blair decide to go for a float.
Gillespie, Blair pointed out, was at Mongo when it was “one of, if not the, most successful software IPOs of all time”.
The growth Multiverse has seen in recent years has mostly been from older apprentices rather than younger ones, Blair said.
“We started off talking about alternatives to university, but it turned out that was only a small part of the story,” he explained. It soon became clear that revolutionary technology, particularly generative AI, meant generations of older employees faced being replaced by technology, or fired for being unable to use it.
“And how do you make sure we don’t end up with lots of people being made redundant? The only way to deal with that is through reskilling,” he said.
So Multiverse expanded into training older workers already at companies. “Now, our youngest apprentice is 18, our oldest is, I think, 68,” he said. “And fascinatingly, the fastest adopters of our AI coaching tool and the most frequent users of our platform are apprentices over the age of 45.”
That trend will only continue, he said. “For companies, there’s a big wave heading towards them now. Every company has AI anxiety: either they think others are moving faster than they are, or they’re worried about the revenues they’re missing out on, or they’re worried about the ethics and practical application.”
For Multiverse, all that worry means big business opportunities. “That’s what’s driving our growth and we’ve just had two record quarters,” he said.
Multiverse still loses money — £40 million in 2023 — as it invests in its expansion, but Blair says it still has plenty of funding left from its last fundraising round and will begin generating cash before that runs out.
So he may not be looking to IPO yet, but you can’t blame the tech world for speculating that it won’t be too long before he does.