They Grew Up in Different Worlds. They both believed the university was broken. So They Built Multiverse.

This is the story of Euan Blair and Sophie Adelman, friends who considered the UK education system through very distinct lenses but arrived at the same conclusion.

Two Founders, Two Very Different Starting Points

Euan Blair was raised at the most prominent address in the nation. At the age of thirteen, when his father, Tony Blair, became Prime Minister in 1997, he found himself living in a household under the brightest of spotlights, day after day. He has stated that growing up in Downing Street meant one had to develop an early, real understanding of the world and one's place within it, and that it was certainly not a normal adolescence; the expectation burden was hardly implicit.

He studied at the University of Bristol before completing a Master's degree in International Relations at Yale, on scholarship. The first job he was offered was as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley. Although intellectually stimulating, he found the role profoundly disengaging. The career, he later noted, was far from the areas which occupied his interest – employment and education.

Leaving Morgan Stanley, he was offered and accepted the role of UK CEO at the Australian business and job training firm Sarina Russo Job Access. It was within this capacity, encountering the unemployed for prolonged periods and realising that apprenticeships could alter the entire course of an individual's life, that the concept that would become Multiverse began to percolate.

From a different world entirely, Sophie Adelman was an entrepreneur by nature long before she had a company to name. After university, she entered the world of startups and impact investment. She became increasingly convinced that the current education system was letting down a clearly delineated yet significant group of people – those who were capable and driven, yet for whom the standard route of higher education was ill-suited, financially out of reach, not relevant to their field, or altogether unavailable.

At the exact point at which Adelman had been considering what a genuine alternative to university education might take the form of, she encountered Euan. There was an instant synergy; Blair had practical experience administering an apprenticeship program and knew precisely what employers looked for in the new generation of talent. Adelman, on the other hand, had the entrepreneurial fire and had precisely worked out what product and community were required to make her mission function, meaning they together had a complete vision.

The initial company, named WhiteHat but soon to be Multiverse, was co-founded by Blair and Adelman in 2016.

The Name, the Mission, and the First Bet

The original name WhiteHat was a nod to the ethical hackers hired by companies to break into and thereby improve their own systems; those working 'off the books' to build strength within an overall structure. The name summed up what the two founders were really trying to do: work 'off the books' of the mainstream educational pipeline to produce better results for both people and organisations.

The mission they set for themselves on day one was to build a brilliant alternative to university. Not a weak alternative. Not a fallback for the rejected. A seriously brilliant pathway for a segment of young people let down by a system which treated a degree as the only legitimate pathway to a professional career.

An uncomfortable dataset served as the basis for their argument. University tuition in England more than tripled in 2012, meaning that graduates left university owing money before they had ever entered employment, whilst employers were moaning about the shortage of people with digital and tech skills, and universities were struggling to respond. It was a situation which covertly cemented inequality; employers use degrees as a sifter, thereby eliminating the ethnic minorities, the working class, and anyone for whom education was a remote prospect.

Euan articulated it brutally: "If employers screen by degree, then automatically they eliminate 70% of the LatinX population and 67% of black people." Sophie saw it as a problem of products: an inflexible product forced on a hugely diverse user base and set of needs. Both were correct and necessary ways to describe WhiteHat.

The model was simple. It sat between ambitious young people and major employers. It paired people using aptitudes, not grades or qualifications. Then it provided quality structured training using the 'learning on the job, formal study' model. The apprentices earned a wage as they worked. The employers found skilled individuals perfectly suited to their needs.

First Milestone: Lightspeed, £3 Million, and Real Traction

In 2018, WhiteHat secured a 3 million seed round, led by one of the most respected tech investors in the world: Lightspeed Venture Partners. The investment told WhiteHat that it was neither a charity nor a social enterprise. It was a tech company, and the market urgently needed what it was doing, and what it was doing could be done at scale.

By then, WhiteHat had already secured a client list that included Facebook, Morgan Stanley, KPMG, Microsoft, and Citi. Choosing the right initial employer clients was strategic. If the core problem were to show that apprenticeships were a viable alternative to graduate hiring, the strongest evidence would be the hardest clients of all adopting them.

The data was compelling. 55% of WhiteHat apprentices were BAME, 22% were Black. 53% were women, and importantly, this included roles within engineering or other technical fields. 33% had received free school meals at some point in their lives. The platform was getting to the exact target market it aimed for, and it was getting them to the precise type of employer that would otherwise have screened them out.

Sophie's belief in creating a genuine community for apprentices, rather than merely a matching and training service, was evident in WhiteHat's retention data: apprentices felt part of something bigger than themselves and a support network that kept them on the programme at much higher rates than the industry average. The community was not a gimmick. It was the product.

Rebranding, US Expansion, and the Mistake That Nearly Cost Them

In 2021, the founders raised $130 million in Series C funding at an $875 million valuation, changed their name from WhiteHat to Multiverse, and expanded into the United States.

The rebrand was thought out. WhiteHat was fine in the UK but had negative connotations in the US market. Multiverse was bigger, more ambitious, and better suited to the global approach they wanted to take. Sophie stepped back from her day-to-day operational role at this stage, remaining on the board as a director, while Euan continued as CEO.

The US expansion was not straightforward.

Euan has been open about it in subsequent interviews: "we went in big and fast... Without understanding in minute detail those employer relationships and the regulatory framework that we had spent five years developing in the UK... In America, that market is organised differently, less mature, and less well understood by the enterprise buyers they needed to sell to... That hyper-growth we had enjoyed in the UK felt painfully and costly to achieve in the US."

By 2023, it was apparent that things weren't going quite as expected with the US endeavour. They decided to cut losses, regroup, and focus on what did work, what was a trying period, and on the fact that March 2023 revenue was so much lower than the $1.7Bn valuation suggested. This weighed heavily on everyone.

However, Euan didn't try to shirk the responsibility. The US expansion, he conceded in interviews, had been rushed and insufficient understanding taken of local conditions- they had assumed that the model that worked in the UK would translate into a slightly adjusted version in the US. It didn't, and the lesson was expensive.

The Pivot That Saved the Business

The strategic shift that sprang from the US reset was the most critical decision Multiverse had made since its founding. Though it was important to the mission, Multiverse understood that corporate upskilling-helping companies train their current employees in data, AI and technology-represented a much bigger and faster-growing commercial opportunity. Enterprise clients who had started as apprenticeship customers began asking Multiverse to train the whole company. It was a real, significant opportunity. As of 2024, the corporate upskilling side of the business was contributing about 90 per cent of revenue. They had built an AI-powered coaching tool called Atlas, which Euan called a Socratic coach, that used questioning to help learners find answers for themselves, embedding the philosophy that had helped build its apprenticeship product into a scalable AI product. In April 2024, it bought SearchLight, a US recruitment software company, combining Multiverse's size and training offer with SearchLight's technology for candidate assessment and intelligence. It seemed a move indicating that the company had taken on board its past mistake in the US and was returning to the US again, more steadily and correctly. The company's income for the year ending March 2025 was £79.6m. However, the company continued to invest in growth, making a loss of £63.3m during the year under review, indicating that there is no problem with the business model or capital required for the rapid development of infrastructure and technology. The company had 813 employees as of early 2026.

What Both Founders Believed About Education

Perhaps the most compelling dimension of the Multiverse story is that both founders genuinely believed in it for reasons beyond pure business logic.

Euan Blair had studied at Bristol and Yale, both top-tier institutions accessible to him. By his own account, were he doing it over, he probably would not bother going to university, not that education isn't valuable. Still, the world has shifted so much that for many people today, the costs (monetary and opportunity) simply no longer make sense. He is not saying that the university experience is not worth it for some. He is simply saying it has been established as the default, and that it should be just one of many equally excellent options.

Sophie Adelman reached a parallel conclusion from the entrepreneur's perspective. She said, talking to Swansea University, "When I was eighteen and had the choice between going to university and doing a digital marketing course with Google, would I have chosen that? Absolutely. Do I regret going to university? No, but I wish I'd had that choice." The existence, not the existence of the choice she actually made, was the source of her concern.

Both founders were building the option they themselves had not had. It is a far more robust driver of energy than simply identifying a market gap and creating an offering to fill it.

Where Multiverse Stands in 2026

Multiverse partners with 1,500+ blue-chip companies, including Microsoft, Citi, and Eat. It has coached 16,000+ professional apprentices, and its enterprise upskilling programmes, in AI, data and technology skills, are expanding rapidly as businesses are failing to close capability gaps through traditional hiring quickly enough.

The company has raised $415M+ to date, from firms including Lightspeed Venture Partners, General Catalyst, Index Ventures and StepStone Group. Its $1.7bn valuation – determined during its Series D round in 2022 – is a current measure, and profitability is contingent on maintaining growth in its enterprise offering.

Martha Lane Fox, widely seen as Britain's best-known technology woman, became a non-executive director in November 2024, a vote of confidence in the institutional credibility it has earned.

Euan Blair remains CEO, with Sophie Adelman still a director and a shareholder; her founding view of what Multiverse should be is the lodestar for all its major decisions.

What Their Story Teaches Every Founder

The Multiverse story is about two often-unrelated themes: mission and adaptiveness.

Euan and Sophie launched their company driven by a stark moral belief that the education system fails many of the people they believed should be at its centre; they still hold that conviction today. However, the method they took to action that belief changed considerably as a result of an aborted expansion attempt, an operational redirection, and a market that proved more receptive to the corporate upskilling skills than it was to their apprenticeship-matching skills.

The ability to adapt the route without losing the destination's purpose often distinguishes companies that fail in turbulent times from those that don't. Euan's lack of guard about the US expansion, and what worked wrong there and why is rare, particularly for founders at a company that still stands at over a billion dollars; it is an uncommon expression in direct, pragmatic terms, of the values on which the company was founded; the willingness to assess what is and is not working, as opposed to the more comfortable narrative that every thing was always going according to plan.

Sophie's decision to leave the day-to-day operational side of the business whilst staying engaged with the mission is a distinct form of leadership; she has built something tangible, stepped away when someone else was needed for the next part of the journey, but continued to invest her insights where they still counted. This, too, is worth a look.

Final Thought: The Choice They Both Wished They Had Had

Euan Blair was born into the stress of Downing Street and the burden of expectation associated with it. Sophie Adelman was born into it with the gift of entrepreneurialism and the disquiet that what was provided to her generation was not sufficient.

They met, saw the issue in the same light, and created the company that addressed it. It hasn't been a smooth journey: a pivot, a rebrand, an inadequate international launch, a relaunch and finally, a rebuild. Throughout, however, an essential truth has remained. Competent individuals shouldn't be banned from the best opportunities simply because they haven't followed a linear path.

They constructed the option they wished they had had, and thousands of people now have a path they wouldn't have had otherwise.