Interview: Euan Blair’s Multiverse acquires StackFuel, plus, its push into Europe, and their plans for AI

0:00Hello and welcome to Path Founders with me, Mike Butcher.

0:06Multiverse is a AI oriented training company which has raised more than$400 million in total from big name investors such as Index Ventures, Lightspeed and General Catalyst. And in 2022, it hit a$1.7 billion valuation after it raised$220 million. But of course, it's not 2022 anymore. So where's the company go from here? Well, in 2026, it acquired a new company in Germany. And joining me now to talk about that is Ewan Blair, founder and CEO of Multiverse. Welcome to Path Founders. Hi, Mike. Great to be on the show. Looking forward to it. Great. Thank you so much for joining. Well, now let's get into it.

0:47The news headline is you've just acquired Berlin-based Stackfuel. Tell us about that company and what specifically did they have that you couldn't build yourself? So first, StatFuel, at this point, the leading data upskilling platform in Germany, doing a huge amount with companies across industries in training workers on the job to use data skills to go quicker and faster. They just started to get into AI. And for us, it was incredibly exciting because we've been looking at Germany for a while. Germany is Europe's largest economy, yet one of its least digitally transformed. They've got an incredibly skilled workforce up to a point, but digital skills are something the government is really trying to encourage and businesses are really trying to catalyze.

1:29And so for us to kind of get a foothold into the German market, take our AI platform, our AI curriculum and training and really use that to kind of ramp in Germany was incredibly exciting. And I think if you look at the German government as part of the coalition agreement said that it wanted to become an AI nation, it will only do that by skilling huge volumes of people on the job. And that's what we want to help. But you were in Germany already, weren't you? No, well, on a very small scale. We'd literally sort of begun to launch there. But this was a real accelerator growth. And, you know, one of the best reasons to acquire an organisation in Germany like Stackfuel is you get great German talent.

2:07They have an incredible employee base. They know the market really well. They've got existing customer relationships. And it was just quite a sort of it made sense for us. But given we've got big ambitions and we want to really accelerate growth. I don't think you released much detail about the deal. Was there a reason for that or is it shares or what? Yeah, mix of mix of cash and equity. What I can tell you, mix of cash and equity. it was a good deal all around for all parties and the two founders are both staying long term in the project which is great because I think Leo and Stefan, CEO and CTO respectively are really exceptional individuals and when you enter a new market you want to be you want to make sure a local team are the kind of backbone of that market entry.

2:53So obviously this is part of a I presume a broader European strategy any other kind of targets next on the list? Looking really closely at multiple European geos. I think what is, look, our mission is to equip the workforce to win in the AI era. AI is both the biggest threat and the biggest opportunity for the workforce. The only way we're going to sort of maximize the opportunity angle while mitigating the threat is training as many people on the job as possible. And in Europe, you've long had this kind of social contract between employer and employee, where there's an expectation that you invest in them, and they kind of return that investment through better workforce outcomes.

3:30and we're really excited that the French government looking very seriously at what they can do to kind of catalyze investment in upskilling the Italian government the Spanish government and I think one of the things that's interesting in Europe is governments are prepared to basically say we're not just going to rely on companies to do these things but we're going to build a series of incentives to make it more appealing for organizations to invest in their incumbent workforce so that the threat of job displacement doesn't kind of manifest and instead we can turn this into a productivity boom.

4:01My core thesis is if we are going to make sure AI is net beneficial to both organizations and the workforce, it's going to require serious hands on the keyboard training in the flow of work. And if we don't do that, we'll end up with even more job displacement than we saw during deindustrialization and much worse outcomes politically. I definitely want to get into that subject with you in a minute, but thinking about the expansion again um obviously this is this is a move into germany and you've talked about france that sounds like next on your list but you also attempted to go into the u.s didn't you and that didn't quite come off as i presume didn't quite come up as expected does that mean that europe provides a better set of prospects for you than the u.s at this point europe is a much better opportunity for us for a few reasons but one of those is is one i just touched on look it probably took as longer to realize this than it should have.

4:56But in the US, people are employed at will. There aren't really many incentives for companies to invest in their people long term. Workforce transformation can often be addressed through letting go of large volumes of people and then hiring in new people. There aren't the same series of incentives to really kind of go and invest in the employees you've got on the job. And the idea of an apprenticeship was pretty alien in America, very well established in Europe by contrast. And so to be honest, we think the European opportunity is incredibly exciting to us. No doubt you learn lessons every time you enter a new market and we've certainly learned a few of those.

5:31Do you think you would have changed the strategy to suit the US in a different way or did it just not fit the business fundamentally? Look, I think the right approach for us is a European focused approach, at least in the kind of short to midterm and I feel pretty good about that. Obviously, you've required stack flow. Sometimes these integrations with startups sometimes fail or a bit choppy how do you think it's going to work operationally yeah i think the stat is about half of all acquisitions ultimately fail um look i think from a an integration standpoint we're integrating some of the core functions but we're keeping others separate i think in particular it's really important that you know staff you'll have a strong reputation.

6:15They are scaling, the business was growing 73 % year on year in Germany as well. We want to scale that even faster, but we're going to be very reliant on individuals in that market. We're heavily investing in the team and the company, right? One of the challenges they were facing is that they didn't have a big cash balance to go and kind of take some of the bigger bets and bigger swings they want to. And in the face of what is both a massive market opportunity and a really pressing social need, we are going to be heavily investing in Germany to make sure that's success. And thinking about product as well, I read that Stackfuel had something like a 92 % completion rate for its upskilling and its courses.

6:52How does that compare to where Multiverse is right now? And what side of product integration will you be doing to kind of, you know, improve Multiverse overall? So it's a really impressive completion rate. And one of the things they've done particularly well is they've managed to kind of have a wide range of courses for kind of different personas in the workforce. And this is really important. If you look at our strategy, the biggest audience I want to focus on is really non-technology workers, nurses and doctors, retail workers, factory workers, people working in local and central government, because you can use technology to give them superpowers and make them way more productive if you train them on the job.

7:33And you consistently see the best outcomes around learning come from when the training itself is as relevant as possible to the work they're doing. Stackfuel have some really cool ideas in this area. We've built some great stuff. I think the combination will be really spectacular. And what we're really excited about bringing to Germany is our AI Agended Coach Atlas. Atlas has a 99 % plus satisfaction rate. It receives 15 ,000 messages a day. And one of the things it does really well is it kind of interprets context, workplace context, and maps that against our learning outcomes, because actually you need to be really context aware if you're going to basically help people sort of start to deconstruct and reconstruct workflows around AI.

8:16And that has been, that's probably one of the areas we're spending most time on both how you reimagine workflows around AI, and then second, how you make sure that you can evidence learning outcomes really well. Nearly every organization in the end cares about three things, cost avoidance, cost reduction and revenue generation. If you can show them that by training people on the job, they can meaningfully make an impact against those three areas, you're on to something really special. Right. Yes. And it's yeah, everyone's talking about this kind of thing, this this this impact on workforces right now.

8:48But you were really early into the game, obviously. Multiverse was, I think, very much a pioneer of the whole idea of technology upskilling and obviously moved into the AI era. you have a war chest but it's obviously being eaten away you the latest filings showed that you about a 63 million pound pre-tax loss on just under 80 million revenue for year ending March 2025 you made some layoffs as one would expect I guess in these circumstances you pulled back from the US as we said earlier do you still have the war chest that you think you need and will you be going out to the market to do more fundraising?

9:31Fortunately, we've got plenty of cash on balance sheet. And while I can't show any of the numbers yet, it's safe to say you'll see even more impressive revenue growth figures and a substantial decrease in losses. Profitability is not very far away for us, which is exciting, right? The focus has always been grow the business, go and address this giant market need and do it in as high quality a way as possible. But of course, In the end, every business is valued on its basis of generating free cash flow. So at some point, you do need to be profitable. And we're on that journey right now. And I presume you've still got the backing of your major investors.

10:09Yeah, look, we're fortunate. We've got an amazing cap table, Index, Lightspeed, GC, Bond, D1, all really focused, all really aligned, particularly with the European strategy. And, you know, they continue to back us, as you're seeing through this German acquisition. There are other very much more native AI companies snapping at existing startups heels. How do you feel you're positioned against the more kind of the new kids on the block who are the more native AI? How do you feel about that? Well, we play really nicely with them. Look, we are, if you think about the AI story, you've got billions that's going into the foundational model there.

10:50And already we're seeing some of those get commoditized. and you've got these massive investments into both compute but also foundational model capability. You then talk about some of these AI insurgents. At the application layer, you're seeing vertical players in the legal space, in the healthcare space, in the financial services, and you're seeing some horizontal players. What has been neglected is the adoption layer, and that's really where multiverse sits, right? We're happily, you know, we partner with Microsoft, we partner with Palantir, we partner with Databricks, as well as a whole host of emergent AI startups.

11:25Our basic job is to say, let's help people use your tools to generate effective outcomes for their employer. That is good for you because people will continue to buy AI tools only if they're seeing value. It's good for the workforce because they become more productive and have better outcomes. And it's good for the ecosystem because, look, the huge investments that have gone into AI are going to have to pay off at some point. And the faster that sort of adoption cycle happens and the faster we realize that payoff, the better for everyone, because otherwise the economic consequences could be really severe.

11:56So I see multiverse as playing a pivotal role in this, in helping unlock the potential, not just of the workforce, but a lot of those AI tools, because we've had a 20 year relentless march of software tools. right and yet globally productivity is more or less stagnated that is a problem and it's because we haven't invested enough in the human component and how we take humans on the journey so i actually look that is one of the most exciting things about multiverse is that we can play a pivotal role in this revolution and we're we're targeting doing just that in europe there is also an argument to say that generative ai lowers the barrier to learning itself so people out there are using the models.

12:37You talked about, you know, labor workers or nurses. I mean, many of them have got chat GPT now, they're on their phones. Are you concerned you're sort of also competing against the models themselves in some way? No, not really. Because if you look at it, this is a, I think it's a worldwide story, but you see it particularly in Europe. AI will be defined not by the kind of capability of some of these models and what they can do, but what's actually permissible and allowed in work when you think of data privacy concerns, information security risks, legal risk, various legislation from the EUAI Act to other things that kind of nation states will take it upon themselves to legislate for.

13:18The challenge is always not how you prompt a tool or ask it some questions or get some information, but how you validate that information, how and where you can use it successfully in the workforce and in the workplace, and how you can basically optimise your role around these tools. So however easy the tools come become to sort of actually engage with, the challenge is always going to be in their application. And that's the thing we're really, really focused on. Are you also thinking about the fact that AI upskilling might in the end lead to job displacement because effectively you might be training models on work itself?

14:00And we've got to be wary about predicting the future because you have literally this very broad spread of opinions on what AI will do. Only a small number of which will actually be true. The one thing we can guarantee is training someone on the job in how to use AI to do their job better is almost certainly going to be a net benefit for them and make them much more employable in the future. You know, we often say to people, AI is not going to take a job, but someone with AI skills might. if we can really kind of focus on the diffusion of AI skilling throughout the workforce, throughout society, then we're doing something inherently valuable.

14:36What about the agentic era? Because AI might help upskill someone right now, but in the end, perhaps some of those people are actually just going to be running agents, aren't they? And how are you factoring that into your platform? We are going to need a huge amount of training to be able to do that effectively and to understand the risks and to know what to look out for. And also, it is not an uncomplex process to kind of basically really deconstruct the core components of your job and then build it around agents, right? You can't just snap a finger and suddenly unleash a load of agents across your product or organization because it's not a smart idea for any business.

15:16I think we're seeing incredible strides in technology, but they're not leading to overnight change, right? MCP doesn't mean suddenly there's no issues with data integration anymore right in the end you have to take organizations on the curve and if you look at most of the organizations across europe and most european companies right they are still struggling to cope with the last digital revolution never mind what's coming next so actually one of our jobs is to make sure we take them up the curve as quickly as possible but i don't think we're going to be in a position where suddenly humans don't have work to do because there's a load of agents doing it and uh what what's your personal view you've been an entrepreneur for some time now.

15:53So what's your kind of take on what's going on in the UK and Europe? I mean, the UK is positioning itself very much more on the side of the US models. Europe is talking about sovereignty right now. Have you had any thoughts about that? I'm sure you have. Yeah, I think the rise of kind of AI nativism and sovereignty as a concern is not going to go away because, you know, we live in a world that is changing very rapidly. There is more uncertainty baked in than ever before. And I think the balance for Europe is always going to be how you kind of manage national interests with a pan-European strategy.

16:33And Britain is at its best when it's close to Europe. It also needs to be close to America. If Britain can kind of chart a third way through that, it can end up being incredibly successful as a result. But I, you You know, there's no, I think there's anyone sensible in the British political arena talking about decoupling from either Europe or the US. We're going to have to figure out how to work with both. And if we get it right, Britain becomes the incredible magnet for talent. I do think it is vital we kind of really build strong economic bridges with Europe because Britain's future without Europe would look pretty great.

17:05Well, Ewan, I'm not going to let you get away with throwaway lines using the third way. yeah i should see that coming yeah someone else said that i think yeah uh given your uh your your uh history and your family but um but let's leave that at that i'll give you i'll give you a hail mary pass for that one um look um it's great to talk to you and uh very interesting to see what you're doing at this merger this merger with uh or rather acquisition sorry of stack flow very interesting you're pushing into europe it's so interesting to hear that Europe has such different positioning on skilling compared to the US.

17:46Just one last point on that. Will that mean that you'll have a similar or different approach to, say, I don't know, Asia, Latin America, Africa, perhaps? Yeah, look, it's very geography dependent. You know, you look at Singapore, by the way, has a thriving apprenticeship sector, and they're investing hugely in their workforce. Australia, likewise. You need to look at the Middle East, somewhere like Saudi Arabia, where women are entering the workforce in unprecedented numbers and need huge amounts of training. This is an opportunity around the world. The immediate focus for us is Europe, but there's no reason we wouldn't look much further afield, right?

18:20These are global problems. They require global solutions. Well, on that note, thank you very much, Ewan Blair, founder and CEO of Multivallus, for joining us on PathFounders.

18:39We'll be right back.