Coursera Finalizes Merger With Udemy

In Brief

Coursera and Udemy finalized their all-stock merger.
The two platforms will operate under the Coursera name.
Corporate buyers get a bigger catalog and more data, but pricing and integration details haven't been shared.

Coursera's $2.5 billion deal to buy Udemy closed today, nearly six months after it was first announced. The two online learning companies, once direct competitors, are now a single business under the Coursera name. The combined company pulls together 290 million learners, 18,000 enterprise customers, and 95,000 instructors, making it the biggest online skills platform in the world, by a wide margin.

The Deal at a Glance

The merger was announced in December 2025 and approved by shareholders of both companies on April 9. It's an all-stock deal, meaning no cash changed hands. Udemy shareholders received 0.8 shares of Coursera stock for every Udemy share they owned.

Udemy has stopped trading on NASDAQ. Coursera continues to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under "COUR."

Former Coursera shareholders now own about 59% of the combined company; former Udemy shareholders own the rest. Coursera CEO Greg Hart leads the new company. Andrew Ng, who co-founded Coursera in 2012, stays on as board chair. Three of the nine board seats go to former Udemy directors.

Coursera and Udemy, By the Numbers

Together, the two companies brought in roughly $1.5 billion in revenue in 2025. Coursera alone reported $757.5 million, up 9% from 2024, and has guided 2026 revenue to between $805 and $815 million on a standalone basis.

The company expects to cut about $115 million in annual costs from the combined operation within two years, most of it in the first year. That's standard merger playbook: eliminate overlapping roles, consolidate technology, share marketing spend.

Coursera also plans to start buying back its own stock within two weeks.

Why Now: The AI Story

Online learning companies are competing to position themselves as essential to the AI-driven labor market. The argument is that college degrees and one-time certifications can't keep up with how fast jobs are changing, and that bigger catalogs plus more learner data will eventually make personalized, AI-driven training possible at scale.

Both Coursera and Udemy have been adding AI features for the past two years, but most of what's live today is assistive rather than adaptive. Coursera Coach answers learner questions, summarizes lectures and runs role-play scenarios. Udemy's AI Assistant helps learners find relevant courses and stay on track. Both companies have AI tools that help instructors build courses faster, and both offer AI-generated skills mapping and learning paths for enterprise admins. Coursera has also leaned into AI translation, with more than half its catalog now available in 26 languages.

The more ambitious work is still rolling out. Udemy announced an AI-powered micro-learning experience in December 2025 that will convert long-form video courses into short, adaptive modules — its biggest bet yet on personalization, phasing in through 2026. Coursera launched a learning agent for Microsoft 365 Copilot in Q1 2026 that pulls course content into the flow of work.

In a statement on the deal closing, Hart said the combined company would move "beyond a content catalog" toward something more adaptive and intelligent. That depends on merging the two separate product lines first, with no timeline of when that will happen.

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