The key moments, with employee sentiment along the way.
2010
🌱
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
🦄
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
📈
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
2022
The learning surge fades
Course sales sag as the world reopens and competition intensifies; the stock spends the year sliding.
Macrotrends
2022
💔
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
🤝
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 Avalara · LinkedIn ↗
Eren Bali
co-founder & founding CEO (worked on the idea in Turkey from 2007 before moving to the US)
