Udemy

Founded by Eren Bali, Gagan Biyani, and Oktay Caglar in 2010, Udemy is a massive open online course (MOOC) provider. Its online learning platform is used by professional adults, students, companies, and governments. Individual learners can access self-paced, on-demand courses for professional development or personal enrichment built by instructors on the Udemy platform. Courses may be free or paid, depending on the instructor. In October 2021, the company reported more than 201 million course enrollments with over 44 million users globally.

Udemy for Business offers an employee training and development platform that allows companies to host and distribute their own content and provides subscription access to business-relevant courses and analytics. Udemy Business Pro, launched in September 2021, offers new features like Udemy Paths, skills assessments, workspaces, and hands-on labs across critical skills in information technology, software development, and data and analytics. Udemy for Government offers a customizable learning platform to upskill workers. In June 2022, Udemy Business announced it had expanded its presence in Asia-Pacific, offering 8,000 international courses in 13 local languages. As of June 2022, Udemy for Business offered a library of 16,000 courses (international+custom topics) for over 7,000 enterprise users. 

In August 2021, Udemy acquired CorpU, an online leadership development platform, allowing it to expand the number of offerings on its platform to include CorpU’s immersive business leadership training courses, strengthening its position in the upskilling sector.

Key customers and partnerships

In February 2021, Betterworks, a strategy execution enterprise software company, integrated its Objectives & Key Results (OKR) platform with Udemy for Business. The integration allows employees who set an OKR in Betterworks to search and link Udemy for Business courses from within the Betterworks interface and capture learning progress and outcomes. 

In April 2022, the company entered the South Korean market by partnering with Woongjin ThinkBig, a local AI-based education company, to offer Udemy and Udemy Business to users in the region. In August 2022, Udemy partnered with vocational-education training provider Sanjieke, to expand its market presence in China. As of August 2022, Udemy had more than 8,000 courses in China, with ~600 courses in Mandarin. During the same month, the firm partnered with online education platform FUNiX, to expand its offering to the Vietnamese market.

In March 2024, Udemy and Paradiso Solutions, a learning management system, collaborated to integrate an e-learning course catalog into an AI-powered learning management system (LMS) by providing comprehensive learning solutions that cover various aspects of learner education and enhance the existing content analytics and collaboration features. 

Funding and financials

In February 2020, Udemy raised USD 50 million from its partner in Japan, Benesse Holdings. The funds will be used to expand its consumer and enterprise businesses, improve the delivery of courses by its network of instructors, and expand its international operations. In November 2020, the company raised an additional USD 50 million in a Series F financing after filing for a USD 100 million funding round. The funds will be used toward the continued growth of its consumer and business offering. In October 2021, Udemy filed to go public on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker symbol “UDMY” and raised USD 421 million at USD 29 per share.

For the full-year 2022, the company's revenue grew by 22% YoY to reach USD 629.1 million. However, it also reported an operational loss of USD 151.2 million, which is a significant increase of 94% compared to the previous year. The adjusted EBITDA loss also increased by 74% YoY to USD 48.7 million. However, the non-GAAP loss per share improved to USD 0.48 per share from USD 0.80 per share in 2021. In Q2 2023, Udemy made slight adjustments to its revenue target for FY2023E, increasing the lower end of the range to USD 712 million (from USD 702 million) and reducing the upper end to USD 720 million (from USD 730 million). It also revised the estimated EBITDA margin to be 1.0%–0.0% from 3.5%–1.5%.