Dive Brief:
- Coursera is acquiring fellow MOOC provider Udemy to create an online education and upskilling giant valued at $2.5 billion, the companies announced Wednesday.
- The combined company is poised to generate $1.5 billion in annual revenue and eliminate some $115 million in costs, Coursera and Udemy said in a press release.
- In explaining the deal — expected to close in the second half of 2026 — the companies pointed to their complementary consumer-facing and business-to-business offerings, as well as rising demand for artificial intelligence skills training.
Dive Insight:
Coursera and Udemy featured AI prominently in their merger rationale, saying that their combination would provide skills training for the emerging technology to the global workforce.
Elaborating, the companies said the combination would enhance “capacity for sustained investment in AI-driven platform innovation, rapid product development, and durable growth initiatives.”
The messaging tracks with each company's emphasis on the technology prior to the merger announcement.
AI was mentioned over 50 times on an outlook and strategy call with Coursera executives in November. On the call, CEO Greg Hart touted Coursera’s “AI-enabled platform,” which includes an AI tutor called Coursera Coach.
“We need to continue to accelerate our development cycles to leverage AI and data to improve the learner experience and continuously enhance our capabilities across all areas of the platform,” Hart said.
On the company’s latest earnings call, Hart described generative AI as “the most in-demand skill in Coursera’s history.” On average, 14 users per minute were enrolling in one of the company’s roughly 1,000 generative AI courses, he said.
Meanwhile, Coursera recently partnered with OpenAI to embed the MOOC provider’s platform directly into ChatGPT, making its videos and information available to the AI platform.
Likewise, Udemy CEO Hugo Sarrazin emphasized AI’s importance to the company’s business on its latest earnings call in October.
Framing AI as a demand driver for Udemy’s offerings, he said that “companies are heavily invested in AI transformation” but are “struggling to demonstrate ROI because many haven't developed the core workforce capabilities required to extract value from their investments.”
At the same time, both companies also acknowledge potential downsides to AI. In Coursera’s latest earnings report with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, its list of risk factors pointed to the novelty of AI and cautioned that the market for AI skills and Coursera’s own AI products may not grow as planned.
Moreover, the company said, AI could “displace or otherwise adversely impact the demand for online learning solutions, including our offerings.”
That is exactly what has happened to ed tech specialist Chegg, which operates in an adjacent space with online learning tools. The company recently announced it would lay off nearly half its staff after multiple quarters of cratering revenue, which Chegg executives have attributed to loss of traffic — and thus subscribers — with the release of Google’s AI summaries in the search giant’s results.
For now, Coursera and Udemy are relatively stable financially for tech companies in a dynamic, ever-changing market. Both companies logged over $550 million in revenue for the first nine months of their fiscal years. In both cases, that represented growth from the previous year.
While Coursera is historically unprofitable, Udemy made $6.1 million in net income for the first three quarters of its fiscal year after a $75.4 million loss for the same period last year.
Coursera is valued more highly, with a market cap of $1.3 billion to Udemy’s $948.7 million as of Wednesday afternoon. Under the transaction, which requires regulatory and shareholder approvals, Udemy shareholders will receive 0.8 shares of Coursera stock for each of their Udemy shares.
