Udemy

Edtech / online learningUSA

New to Unitard

📉 Public < $1B

Peak $3.78 BillionRecorded estimate

~-81%

from peak

🦄
Became a unicorn
2020
📈
Peak valuation
$3.78 Billion ’21
💔
Became a Unitard
2022
💸
Last valuation estimate
~$718M

Current status

Acquired by Coursera (May 2026) and delisted

The rise & fall

7 moments · 2010–2026

The key moments, with employee sentiment along the way.

2010

Founded as a marketplace for anyone to teach

Eren Bali, Oktay Caglar and Gagan Biyani open a course bazaar where independent instructors sell classes on everything from coding to cooking.

Wikipedia

2020

Pandemic learning makes it a unicorn$3.25B

Locked-down students and corporate training budgets pile in; a 2020 round values the marketplace around $3.25B.

TechCrunch

Oct 2021

The peak: a $3.78B IPO$3.78B

Lists on Nasdaq in October 2021, almost exactly at its private-market high. That turns out to be the top.

IPOScoop

2022

The learning surge fades

Course sales sag as the world reopens and competition intensifies; the stock spends the year sliding.

Macrotrends

2022

Slips out of the club

The fall eventually runs to roughly 81% — about $700M — before the story ends somewhere unexpected.

Macrotrends

2022–25

From the inside · Glassdoor reviews, 2022–25

Glassdoor reviews from the slide described layoffs that struck many employees as abrupt and hard to make sense of, a collaborative culture longtimers felt eroded under new leadership, and recurring worries that product innovation lagged while competitors gained ground.

May 2026

Absorbed by rival Coursera

The two big course platforms merge into a ~$2.5B combined company and UDMY delists in May 2026 — the pandemic edtech boom's consolidation endgame.

stockanalysis

💬 entries paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗; dated facts carry their source.

How it happened

Udemy runs a vast online-course marketplace where independent instructors sell classes on everything from coding to cooking, plus a business-training arm. A private unicorn valued around $3.25B, it went public in October 2021 near a $3.78B market value, but growth slowed sharply as the pandemic learning surge faded and competition intensified, and the stock fell roughly 81% to around $700M before rival Coursera absorbed it in a 2026 merger.

Source: stockanalysis / Macrotrends / IPOScoop (~$3.78B market cap at Oct 2021 IPO; fell ~81% to ~$700M by 2026; acquired by Coursera in a ~$2.5B combined-company merger, delisted May 2026)

Founders & leadership

Hugo Sarrazin
CEO (last Udemy CEO; led it into the Coursera acquisition, from March 2025)
Now Chief Executive Officer at AvalaraLinkedIn ↗
Eren Bali
co-founder & founding CEO (worked on the idea in Turkey from 2007 before moving to the US)
Now Cofounder/CEO at MonogramLinkedIn ↗
Oktay Caglar
co-founder (engineering)
No public profile matched
Gagan Biyani
co-founder (business; the founders were turned down thirty times before raising)
Now CEO and Co-Founder at MavenLinkedIn ↗