Multiverse just closed $70M at a $2.1B post-money.
The pitch: identify workforce skill gaps and train employees in data, digital, and AI capabilities. The investor list reads like a who’s-who of growth capital: Schroders led, with General Catalyst, Lightspeed, Index, Bond, and StepStone in.
Why are sophisticated growth investors writing big checks against corporate upskilling right now?
Because the talent gap has gotten larger and the way to address that has shifted considerably.
The skills that ERP-running companies need today (AI literacy across finance, ops, supply chain, and CX; data fluency at the analyst tier; the ability to evaluate AI-assisted output) will be increasingly difficult to hire in volume moving forward (unless you have a dedicated recruiting partner that specializes in this space of course!)
They will need also need to augment this outside hiring by building the knowledge base from within.
A few honest observations from where I sit in the Microsoft Dynamics and NetSuite ecosystem:
The “we’ll just hire for it” plan is dead at the mid-market. There are not enough D365 functional consultants with real AI fluency to staff the projects already signed for 2026, let alone the ones queued for 2027.
Partner firms that build internal academies and reskill from adjacent stacks (Salesforce admins moving to Power Platform; legacy ERP analysts moving to Business Central; SuiteScript developers picking up AI agent design) will out-margin partners who keep buying senior talent on the open market.
The PE/VC playbook on ERP-heavy portfolio companies is shifting. The operating partners I talk to are asking different questions in the diligence call than they were 18 months ago.
“What is your AI roadmap?” is one.
“Who on your team can execute it?” is the harder one.
The investors backing Multiverse are betting that upskilling is the only scalable answer.
They are not wrong.
Cross-stack fluency is increasingly becoming the new premium.
The pitch: identify workforce skill gaps and train employees in data, digital, and AI capabilities. The investor list reads like a who’s-who of growth capital: Schroders led, with General Catalyst, Lightspeed, Index, Bond, and StepStone in.
Why are sophisticated growth investors writing big checks against corporate upskilling right now?
Because the talent gap has gotten larger and the way to address that has shifted considerably.
The skills that ERP-running companies need today (AI literacy across finance, ops, supply chain, and CX; data fluency at the analyst tier; the ability to evaluate AI-assisted output) will be increasingly difficult to hire in volume moving forward (unless you have a dedicated recruiting partner that specializes in this space of course!)
They will need also need to augment this outside hiring by building the knowledge base from within.
A few honest observations from where I sit in the Microsoft Dynamics and NetSuite ecosystem:
The “we’ll just hire for it” plan is dead at the mid-market. There are not enough D365 functional consultants with real AI fluency to staff the projects already signed for 2026, let alone the ones queued for 2027.
Partner firms that build internal academies and reskill from adjacent stacks (Salesforce admins moving to Power Platform; legacy ERP analysts moving to Business Central; SuiteScript developers picking up AI agent design) will out-margin partners who keep buying senior talent on the open market.
The PE/VC playbook on ERP-heavy portfolio companies is shifting. The operating partners I talk to are asking different questions in the diligence call than they were 18 months ago.
“What is your AI roadmap?” is one.
“Who on your team can execute it?” is the harder one.
The investors backing Multiverse are betting that upskilling is the only scalable answer.
They are not wrong.
Cross-stack fluency is increasingly becoming the new premium.