Coursera and Udemy Complete Merger, Forming $1.5bn Skills Platform
Coursera and Udemy have completed their merger, creating one of the largest online learning businesses in the world with 290 million registered learners, 18,000 enterprise customers, and more than $1.5bn in combined annual revenue under a single company.
The all-stock deal, announced in December 2025 and approved by shareholders of both companies in April, closed today. Each Udemy share was exchanged for 0.800 Coursera shares, giving former Udemy stockholders approximately 41% of the combined company and former Coursera stockholders the remaining 59%. Udemy has been delisted from the Nasdaq; the merged entity continues to trade as COUR on the New York Stock Exchange.
The deal's underlying logic is a product bet on two very different kinds of learning. Coursera built its business on structured, university-backed degrees and professional certificates from institutions including Google, Meta, and IBM, its value tied to the credibility of its partners and the rigour of its credentials. Udemy operates as an open instructor marketplace, with over 213,000 courses and 95,000 content creators spanning everything from cloud architecture to creative writing, its appeal rooted in speed and breadth rather than institutional weight. Together, the companies claim to cover the full talent lifecycle: credentialled, outcome-linked programmes on one side, fast and flexible on-demand skills acquisition on the other. The central challenge is whether a single organisation can serve both without diluting either.
Greg Hart, who continues as CEO of the combined company, positioned the merger as a direct response to AI's disruption of the labour market. "The need to continuously learn and master new skills has never been greater," Hart said, adding that the combined company intends to move "beyond a content catalogue" toward an agentic skills delivery system that connects training directly to workplace outcomes. The ambition is considerable: rather than selling access to courses, the merged platform wants to measure, verify, and ultimately predict the skills an employer needs and close those gaps in real time.
That vision, however, is not what users will encounter on day one. Coursera and Udemy will continue to run as separate products, with existing contracts, pricing, and course structures left untouched. Integration will come later, and the company has not given a timeline. What the merger delivers immediately is scale: a data pool spanning 290 million learners and 18,000 enterprise customers that, in theory, gives the combined platform richer signals about how people learn and what skills the market actually values.
The company is targeting $115m in annual cost synergies within 24 months and has signalled a share repurchase programme, with details expected within two weeks. Andrew Ng, co-founder of Coursera and a prominent figure in global AI research, remains as chairman of the board.
