Half Year Funding Report reveals what learning and work founders build next

Written by
David Guérin
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

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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.

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Rhys and David go deeper on this on Sidekick this week and you can download the report here.

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