The story
Founded by Eren Bali and Gagan Biyani in 2010.1
In 2007, Eren Bali and Oktay Caglar created a live virtual classroom while living in Turkey. They moved to Silicon Valley two years later, where they founded Udemy with Gagan Biyani in early 2010. In February 2010, the founders tried to raise venture capital funding, but were rejected 30 times, according to Gagan Biyani. They bootstrapped development of the product and launched Udemy in May 2010. Within a few months, 1,000 instructors had created about 2,000 courses. It raised $1 million in venture funding by August 2010. Early on, Udemy was described by some sources as a MOOC platform.
On April 22, 2014, chief operating officer Dennis Yang succeeded Eren Bali as CEO. In November 2015, Udemy was criticized for profiting from pirated courses on its platform. In 2018, the company expanded its existing anti-piracy efforts via Link-Busters. On February 5, 2019, the Udemy board appointed Gregg Coccari as CEO.
As of November 2020, Udemy had raised $273 million in funding from investors, including Tencent Holdings; its valuation was estimated at $3.25 billion; and it had ranked on Fortune's annual Change the World list. By June 2021, Udemy had not generated a profit, with an accumulated deficit of $407.9 million.
On October 29, 2021, Udemy held its IPO in the U.S. In February 2023, the company began offering over 100 courses in Hindi. In February 2023, Greg Coccari announced his retirement as CEO and chairman, to be succeeded by Greg Brown. In 2024, Udemy announced that it would be cutting the percentage of revenues that academic labor received. By that September, it had laid off 30% of its employees and announced plans to hire in lower-cost regions.
Co-founder Eren Bali returned as chief technology officer in August 2024. He was replaced by Ozzie Goldschmied in June 2025.
In early 2025, it was announced that Hugo Sarrazin would replace Greg Brown as CEO. Shares in the company fell by 8.5% shortly after, before rebounding in the second quarter. In June 2025 Udemy acquired the image-generation tool Lummi, with the goal of allowing instructors to add AI-generated content to Udemy courses.
In August 2025, Udemy reported its first positive net income since its IPO. The company also began offering its platform in Arabic.
In December 2025, Coursera agreed to acquire Udemy for about $930 million in equity, valuing the combined company at $2.5 billion.
From Wikipedia’s article on Udemy, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.7