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Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or watch on Youtube.
Timestamps
1:46 Investors back high-value workflows (legal, HR) where ROI is measurable and status quo is entrenched
2:28 Optimize for business outcomes, not learning experiences
3:45 Series C+ deals now outnumber Series A+B -the market is maturing
5:27 3 of the top 10 deals are legal AI - target knowledge-heavy, documentation-rich workflows
7:33 76% of funding went to just 10 deals. Capital is concentrating in category leaders
8:27 Enterprises buy Multiverse for AI adoption speed, not learning. Sell the outcome!
9:11 Learning is the mechanism. Productivity, performance, retention are what buyers actually purchase
10:34 Every industry will get its own verticalized OS. Context and sector-specific data wins
14:10 SaaS will recentralize as teams rein in fragmented AI tooling
14:24 Learning will become invisible, embedded in workflows. Build for performance, not learning
Rhys, our Head of Platform and Research, sat down to build our H1 report expecting more of the same. Instead he found the pyramid had flipped!
For years, European learning & work funding looked like you'd expect: lots of seed deals, fewer as companies got bigger. This year, for the first time, there were more later-stage deals than early-stage ones: 73 of 178 total.
The lesson isn't really about deal stages, it's about what's getting funded at all. The rounds getting big are the ones solving a measurable business problem, not the ones selling a learning experience.
If you're building in the the learning & work space, this is worth sitting with: are you selling learning, or are you selling a result someone can measure? The market seems to be rewarding the second.
Rhys and David go deeper on this on Sidekick this week and you can download the report here.
