Euan Blair’s apprenticeship company Multiverse has reported a near-tripling of pre-tax annual losses to £40.5m – its seventh straight year of losses since the son of the former prime minister Tony Blair set it up in 2016.
Despite failing to turn a profit, the company was awarded the coveted tech “unicorn” status when it was valued at £1.4bn in a fundraising round driven by US venture capital firms in June last year. That put Blair’s stake in the company at £420m, far more than his father Tony’s reported £60m fortune.
Euan Blair blamed the losses for 44 immediate job cuts he announced on Tuesday, most of them based in the US. “As CEO, this is the toughest decision I have made to date,” he told employees, according to to an email seen by the Guardian. “As the individual responsible for our initial strategy, the requirement to change course, and the decision to do so, I want to explain why we’re making this change.”
Blair said the company had grown its workforce in the US too quickly, and this had led to the increased losses. “I’ve always been clear that we believe a sustainable, profitable company is the best institution to deliver our mission, and I am accountable for building it,” he said. “And that’s why this decision needed to be taken.”
The accounts for Multiverse, which uses automated predictive software to match apprentices with companies based on their aptitude and attitude rather than grades, show its revenue grew by 66% to £45.2m in the year to the end of March 2023.
However, losses widened from £14.2m in 2022 to £40.5m in the same financial year. A company spokesperson chose to send the accounts to selected media outlets on Tuesday ahead of their official publication by Companies House.
Multiverse matches school leavers with more than 300 employers including Google, Facebook, Morgan Stanley and Depop, and provides on-the-job training tailored to the needs of employees, as well as personal coaching and extracurricular activities and societies akin to those at university.
Blair has claimed that some young people have turned down places at Oxford to join his scheme. His business, co-founded with his friend Sophie Adelman, offers what he claims is “a genuine, credible alternative that can compete with university”.
Tony Blair was elected prime minister in 1997 after promising that his three priorities would be “education, education, education”, and he later set a target of getting 50% of school leavers into university. The target was not met until 2019.
But Euan Blair has argued that the nation’s “obsession with the academic as a marker of potential and talent” is holding back people from minority groups and failing to serve the needs of employers in a digital age.
The 39-year-old, who studied ancient history at the University of Bristol before going to Yale, has said he “didn’t love studying”, but when he was growing up, going to university was seen as the only route to a top job. He says he hit upon the idea of setting up a training provider after his first job, at the investment bank Morgan Stanley.
Last year he was awarded an MBE for services to education in the Queen’s birthday honours. He also bought a five-storey townhouse in west London for a reported £22m. The seven-bedroom residence, which he shares with his wife, Suzanne Ashman, and their two children, features a two-storey “iceberg” basement with an indoor pool, gym and multicar garage.
