Euan Blair, the eldest son of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, has built a nine-figure net worth by revolutionizing the way employers meet young talent.
Now, the company wants to take AI a step further, ensuring that employers don’t run afoul of unconscious bias during that arduous hiring journey.
Euan Blair’s education unicorn Multiverse has bought San Francisco startup Searchlight for an undisclosed sum as the struggling group continues to move away from bringing apprentices into work and towards upskilling job seekers of a profit.
Hiring without prejudice
Searchlight, founded by twins Anna Wang and Kerry Wang in 2018, is an “ethical artificial intelligence” platform that seeks to match potential hires to their employers by identifying a company’s skills gaps.
The group also uses what it describes as a “unique learning loop,” which analyzes employee performance data to improve future hiring outcomes.
Its platform also aims to use artificial intelligence to combat unconscious bias practices that can emerge during the recruitment process. This involves taking skills, soft skills and work styles into consideration during the hiring process.
Multiverse’s acquisition of Searchlight cements its reputation as an intelligent hiring platform and will accelerate the group’s use of artificial intelligence.
This was stated by Ujjwal Singh, head of product and technical manager at Multiverse Fortune that the group is getting closer to offering personalized tutoring at scale thanks to this technology.
“It really allows us to take the idea of using AI in the upskilling and reskilling space even further,” Singh said.
Multiverse achieved unicorn status in 2022 with a $220 million funding round that netted the company a $1.7 billion valuation. America’s richest family, the Waltons, were one of the supporters of the Multiverse in that round.
This came a year after the group received $44 million in funding in a Series B round.
Multiverse started as a platform to attract high school graduates promising careers without going to college through apprenticeships.
Blair has often railed against an education system where rising tuition fees and falling standards mean that for many the calculations of continuing their studies don’t add up.
“My degrees were not at all useful for work, but I had to convince them to get a job,” Blair said Fortune’s term sheet newsletter at the time of its Series B turn. “College is an oligopoly that is not beneficial to those who pay for the programs.”
The group’s “apprentice population”, including alumni, has almost doubled from 7,600 in 2022 to 13,300 in 2023.
However, after failing to make a profit in its almost eight years of trading, Blair is increasingly shifting the company away from moving apprentices into jobs to focus on upskilling people already in work.
In 2023, the edtech company tripled its losses to £40.5 million ($51.3 million) last year, documents filed at Companies House show.
Blair was forced to lay off 44 employees late last year, saying the company had hired too quickly, which had contributed to its huge losses.
Most of the cuts were made in the company’s US office, where Blair’s group had expanded after its Series D funding round.
In October, City AM reported that the layoffs had affected the company’s top talent team, tasked with leading Multiverse’s once-crucial apprenticeship division.
Some of Multiverse’s clients, including Citi, Microsoft and KPMG, have been forced to cut spending due to the economic downturn, encouraging the company to find other ways to sell its educational products.
The proliferation of AI over the past couple of years has presented itself as an opportunity for Multiverse to bring these new products to customers. Singh gave an example of Multiverse helping to retrain more than 5,000 bank tellers in the United States
Singh describes Multiverse’s move towards upskilling as an addition to the group’s apprenticeship offering, rather than a pivot from it. However, in financial terms, it could be the key to unlocking sustainable growth for the company.
“We are the ones who react to what the market asks for. It allows us to be much more resilient. I think it is also our path to profitability,” Singh said.
Things can only get better
Although he has been forced to rein in US hiring, Blair’s acquisition of a San Francisco-based company still represents a rare reversal from the trend of US companies acquiring smaller UK rivals.
Multiverse cites Crunchbase data showing over the past two months that for every US company acquired by a UK company, 3.6 UK companies were bought by a US group.
“After meeting Anna and Kerry and learning more about the Searchlight product, I was really excited about how they were using AI to spot patterns and identify qualification solutions both within and outside the workforce,” Blair said in a statement following the announcement.
“Most companies are embarking on a technological transformation journey and want to do it fairly and effectively. What often holds them back is the gap between the transformation they want to see and the skills that will unlock it. “
Multiverse is using acquisitions to accelerate the transition to upskilling, which is increasingly in the spotlight as companies race to make their staff more AI-literate to boost productivity.
In May last year, the group purchased Eduflow, an online learning platform, to help drive this upskilling journey.
Singh believes Multiverse can help demystify what has become a race for AI capabilities, in a space where employers and employees are rarely aligned on how to leverage the technology.