Udemy Business Model & Plans Explained (2026)

Updated October 2026 · reviewed for today

In short

Udemy makes money by selling courses made by independent instructors in two ways: Udemy Business, seat-based subscriptions sold to companies ($524.1 million, 66 percent of revenue in fiscal 2025), and a consumer marketplace of single courses and Personal Plan subscriptions ($265.8 million). Instructors receive a share of revenue, which Udemy books as content costs. Since 11 May 2026 Udemy has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Coursera, after an all-stock merger.

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How it makes money

01

Udemy Business (Enterprise)

Companies license curated course collections per seat, mostly on annual or multi-year contracts. Enterprise revenue rose 6 percent to $524.1 million in fiscal 2025, and annual recurring revenue was $540.0 million at 31 December 2025.

02

Consumer marketplace

Individuals buy single courses or a Personal Plan subscription. Consumer revenue fell 9 percent to $265.8 million in fiscal 2025 as single-course sales declined.

03

Instructor revenue share

Instructors are paid a share of the revenue their courses earn. For subscriptions Udemy cut that share to 20 percent in 2024, 17.5 percent in 2025 and 15 percent from 1 January 2026.

04

Margins

Gross margin rose to 66 percent in fiscal 2025 from 63 percent, mainly because Udemy cut the instructor revenue share on all subscription offerings.

What changed in 2025-26

Acquired by Coursera

Udemy agreed an all-stock merger with Coursera on 17 December 2025. It closed on 11 May 2026: each Udemy share became 0.800 Coursera shares, and Coursera issued 116.6 million shares with a fair value of $660.1 million.

Inside Coursera's numbers

From 11 May to 30 June 2026 Udemy added $103.8 million of revenue and a $31.2 million net loss to Coursera, whose second-quarter revenue was $298.6 million. Coursera still reports two segments, Enterprise and Consumer.

Back to a profit, just

Udemy reported net income of $3.8 million for fiscal 2025, after a $85.3 million loss in 2024, while total revenue was almost flat at $789.8 million.

Selling AI skills

The 10-K describes an AI-powered skills platform with more than 5,500 courses on generative AI skills. It also lists AI as a risk: organisations may rely on AI tools directly instead of training staff.

Udemy's two segments, fiscal 2025

Enterprise (Udemy Business)

Revenue (fiscal 2025)$524.1 million, 66 percent of total

What changedUp 6 percent; 17,029 customers at year-end

Consumer

Revenue (fiscal 2025)$265.8 million, 34 percent of total

What changedDown 9 percent; fewer single-course sales

Total

Revenue (fiscal 2025)$789.8 million

What changedNet income of $3.8 million

Udemy Business retention

Revenue (fiscal 2025)Net dollar retention 93 percent

What changedAs of 31 December 2025

What it means for you

• For instructors: income depends on the revenue share, which Udemy has cut for subscriptions; read the current terms before investing in a course.
• For buyers in HR and learning: Udemy Business is now part of Coursera, so expect product and contract changes as the two catalogues combine.
• For investors: follow Udemy through Coursera's filings; Udemy no longer reports on its own.
• For marketplace builders: the shift from one-off sales to company subscriptions raised margins but slowed growth.
• For anyone selling training: plan for AI tools that answer questions directly, the risk Udemy itself names.

The Business Engineer lens

Udemy shows a two-sided content marketplace moving its money from consumers to enterprise seats, where contracts are steadier and margins higher. In the AI era the pressure is on the middle: generic courses compete with AI tutors, so value moves to curation, measurement and the employer relationship.

Read: The Career Transition Map →Explore the platform →

Related: Coursera business model · Udemy alternatives · Skillshare business model · LinkedIn business model · Who owns Netflix

Frequently asked questions

How does Udemy make money?

By selling instructor-made courses to companies through per-seat Udemy Business subscriptions and to individuals through single courses and Personal Plan subscriptions, then sharing revenue with instructors.

Which is bigger, Udemy Business or the consumer side?

Udemy Business: $524.1 million, or 66 percent of fiscal 2025 revenue, against $265.8 million for Consumer.

Who owns Udemy?

Coursera, Inc. It completed its all-stock acquisition of Udemy on 11 May 2026, and Udemy is now a wholly owned subsidiary.

Is Udemy profitable?

It reported net income of $3.8 million in fiscal 2025, its last full year as a public company.

Sources

• Udemy, Inc. (2026), Annual Report on Form 10-K for fiscal 2025, SEC EDGAR
• Coursera, Inc. (2026), Form 8-K on completion of the combination with Udemy, 11 May, SEC EDGAR
• Coursera, Inc. (2026), Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the period ended 30 June 2026, SEC EDGAR

The full guide

The complete explainer, cleaned up and reformatted for mobile.

How we source: figures on this page come from the company’s own filings (SEC 10-K, 10-Q and earnings releases, or its annual report), with the period stated next to each number. Last refreshed October 2026. Our methodology.

Udemy is an e-learning platform with two primary parts: the consumer-facing platform (B2C). And the enterprise platform (B2B). Udemy sells courses to anyone on its core marketplace, while it sells Udemy for Business only to B2B/Enterprise accounts. As such, Udemy has two key players: instructors on the marketplace, and business instructors for the B2B platform.

What drives Udemy’s revenue

Udemy Business is the engine. Companies buy annual or multi-year licences priced per seat, with volume discounts. Enterprise revenue rose 6% to $524.1M in fiscal 2025, and annual recurring revenue reached $540.0M at year-end. Udemy says the gain came from larger deals with new customers.

The consumer marketplace sells more than 290,000 courses one at a time and a Personal Plan subscription covering more than 28,000 courses. Consumer revenue fell 9% to $265.8M: single-course sales dropped $39.8M, while subscriptions added $13.5M. Paid consumer subscribers rose from 170,000 to 343,000.

Instructors are paid a revenue share, which Udemy records as content costs. In fiscal 2025 these costs were 16% of Enterprise revenue and 32% of Consumer revenue, which is why company sales carry the higher margin.

How Udemy compares

Against its own segments, Enterprise is the stronger business. Its segment adjusted gross margin was 75% in fiscal 2025, against 57% for Consumer (both non-GAAP measures defined by the company).

Against its own history, revenue rose from $515.7M in fiscal 2021 to $789.8M in fiscal 2025, but growth slowed to 0.4% in the last year. Enterprise rose from 63% of revenue in fiscal 2024 to 66% in fiscal 2025.

Side by side: the income statements

Snap: income statement →Duolingo: income statement →Roblox: income statement →

What changed in FY2025

Margins improved. Gross margin rose to 66% from 63%, which Udemy credits mainly to cutting instructors’ share of subscription revenue from 20% to 17.5%. The share fell again, to 15%, on 1 January 2026.

Costs fell. Operating expenses dropped 10% to $522.6M, the operating loss narrowed to $4.2M from $89.3M, and Udemy reported net income of $3.8M against a $85.3M loss a year earlier.

On 17 December 2025 Udemy agreed an all-stock merger with Coursera, at 0.800 Coursera shares per Udemy share. The deal closed on 11 May 2026, and Udemy’s shares were delisted from Nasdaq.

What to watch

Retention. Udemy Business net dollar retention fell to 93% from 98%, meaning existing customers’ cancellations and reductions outweighed upsells. Udemy attributes the drop to customers’ budget scrutiny. Among customers with at least 1,000 employees, retention was 97%.

AI substitution. The 10-K warns that as generative AI tools improve, organisations and individuals may rely on them directly, which could reduce the need for training.

Reporting. As a Coursera subsidiary, Udemy no longer files its own annual results. Future figures will come through Coursera’s filings.

Frequently asked questions

How does Udemy make money?

It sells online courses made by more than 91,000 instructors. Companies pay per seat for Udemy Business subscriptions ($524.1M in fiscal 2025), and individuals buy single courses or Personal Plan subscriptions ($265.8M). Udemy shares a cut of revenue with instructors.

Which is bigger, Udemy Business or the consumer marketplace?

Udemy Business. It produced 66% of revenue in fiscal 2025, up from 63% in fiscal 2024, and grew 6% while the consumer side shrank 9%.

Is Udemy profitable?

Barely, on a GAAP basis. It reported net income of $3.8M in fiscal 2025 after a $85.3M loss in fiscal 2024, and an operating loss of $4.2M. Adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP measure, was $95.3M.

Is Udemy still a public company?

No. Coursera completed its all-stock acquisition of Udemy on 11 May 2026; Udemy is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Coursera and its shares were delisted from Nasdaq.

Origin story

Udemy is an e-learning platform with two primary parts: the consumer-facing platform (B2C). And the enterprise platform ( B2B ).

The Udemy timeline, from its inception and founding to its evolution first with the enterprise offering, then with the subscription offering in 2021 (Image Credit: Udemy Prospectus).

Eren Bali had grown up in a small Turkish village, and as such he had limited learning opportunities until he got a compute — as explored in the economics of AI compute infrastructure — r.

Over the years, thanks to the learning resources acquired online, for free, Eren also won a silver medal at the International Math Olympiad.

Later on, Eren Bali, partnered with Oktay Caglar and Gagan Biyani to get Udemy off the ground, but the idea didn’t seem to find the approval of venture capitalists.

Indeed, as Gagan Biyani explained back in 2010, they pitched over 30 investors, and they got severely rejected.

As Biyani explained:

“We then went out to pitch our startup and got rejected by 30 of the best investors you ever heard of. It was brutal, but we were fortunate enough to bounce back.”

They had to retweak their strategy and bootstrap instead. They first realized they needed some traction at least in terms of either users or money.

Therefore, they opened the platform, make it freely accessible and within a few months they had a thousand instructors that had produced two thousand courses.

Initially, as the site launched, they primarily uploaded University courses freely available on the platform.

That enabled the site to have an initial critical mass, to at least launch and make the site interesting for a decent number of users.

Therefore, as initial traction, the platform uploaded more than 600 video courses from free sources such as MIT’s Online Courseware project.

While that seemed quite the opposite of its mission, to transform anyone into a potential instructor, beyond academic credentials, that initial strategy gave Udemy the ability to gain its first users, thus then becoming more attractive to investors.

Udemy the “mashup of “you” and “academy” would finally gain traction and pitch again only to get the funding it needed to further grow its user base.

Udemy also mastered the mechanism of getting venture capital to be allocated for growth. And over the years, Udemy would get over $223 million in funding.

As with any marketplace/platform, Udemy had to figure the chicken and egg problem. As it would later explain on TechCrunch:

“When we first started it was very difficult, because if you were a teacher why would you want to teach on Udemy; there were no students. If you were a student why would you want to go to Udemy, because there was nobody teaching there, right? So you really had to just grind it out, and build it brick by brick, inch by inch.”

Udemy two-sided value proposition

While Udemy started with the idea to become primarily a consumer platform, today it has two core customer profiles:

• People who are looking to improve their skills for whatever reason, from professional to personal development.
• To employees in medium, large organizations that want to quickly gain access to a vast library of courses so they can keep up with their teams.

It’s important to understand this difference as it will also change the way those two customers are targeted. Where, in general customers on the platform will be acquired via marketing activities and a platform that has many courses for free, which will be prompted to purchase premium courses (a sort of freemium).

On the B2B/Enterprise side, the acquisition will happen through a dedicated sales force which aim is to acquire a large client with a more structured plan, which as we’ll see is a library comprised of thousands of courses.

For that reason, Udemy has two core products:

• Udemy courses for everyone.
• And Udemy for Business.

Udemy’s mission, and vision

Udemy’s mission is “to make quality education more accessible and improve lives through learning” and “to create new possibilities for people and organizations everywhere by connecting them to the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in a changing world.”

As Biyani explained back in 2012, “We only make money if our instructors make money,” as Udemy make a cut on the sale of all paid courses. Biyani also explained the vision of Udemy “to let anyone enter that marketplace, in the same way that blogging let anyone with a computer publish online.”

Therefore, over the years, Udemy transformed thousands of people into online instructors with its platform.

On the B2B/Enterprise side, Udemy’s mission is “to help employees around the world do whatever comes next… Udemy is where employees and companies choose to learn. Organizations can also host and distribute their own proprietary content within their unique Udemy for Business account.”

A two-sided marketplace

In a two-sided marketplace, usually, network dynamics are triggered as a feedback loop between two main players.

In Udemy’s case, you have instructors and students. Instructors are critical, as the more courses are available on Udemy, the more students will be drawn to it.

And in these cases, to kick off the network, there is the chicken and egg dilemma.

The platform/marketplace needs to decide where to start, in terms of focused growth to kick off the platform.

For instance, in Udemy’s case, to kick start the platform, rather than enrolling right own instructors, the founders started to upload free video lectures from Universities, which were available on the web.

Therefore, the platform started more as a curation website. As the user base grew, they started to invest more and more in enrolling new instructors, therefore kicking off its network of students.

Udemy business strategy

Where other EdTech companies (like Courser and EdX) have helped academic institutions get online. Udemy has followed the opposite path, that of helping anyone become an instructor and make money with that.

Therefore, when Udemy started, it worked as a sort of CMS for online courses, where it was effortless to set up an online course and start selling it thus making additional income online.

On the other hand, over the years, Udemy also built up its B2B/enterprise platform, with Udemy for the Business offering, which targeted a completely different customer.

Key partner: Instructors

With over a hundred million visits each month on the platform, no doubt that Udemy is among the most known educational marketplaces. Therefore, if the platform wasn’t that popular it would not be that interesting either for instructors.

Another thing that makes Udemy interesting to instructors is its simple revenue-share structure divided into three areas:

• Instructor Promotion: here Udemy acts as a CMS, where it gets a 3% administrative processing fee, while 97% is given to the instructor.
• Udemy Organic: If the sales come through Udemy organic traffic the revenue is split 50/50.
• Paid User Acquisition Channel Sales: If Udemy has pushed the course through its paid acquisition strategies (promotion and affiliations), 25% goes to instructors.

It is fundamental for Udemy’s continued growth to have a sustainable Instructors’ community that keeps producing quality courses for the platform. And this all starts by enabling them to earn enough revenues through the platform.

Key customer: Udemy For Business

While Udemy is a platform that reaches millions of people, with its inexpensive, and often free courses. In reality, Udemy has been pushing its Udemy for Business comprising:

• Unlimited access to the top 4,000+ courses selected from Udemy.com – anytime, on any device
• Fresh content taught by 1,500+ experts and real-world practitioners – for any learning style
• Actionable learning insights and admin functionality

Where the Udemy platform targets mostly consumers and B2C, and many of its courses are free. Udemy for Business instead attracts companies to offer a complete e-learning plan for the organization.

Udemy in numbers

How does it make money? Two-sided revenue modeling

The company reached over $429 million in sales by 2020, almost doubling its revenues as the pandemic hit, thus making online learning much more appealing. As of 2020, the company registered an over $74 million net loss. With most of the costs skewed toward content development costs (revenues are split with instructors developing content on the platform), together with platform/technical development and maintenance and sales and marketing activities).

The Udemy revenue streams can be primarily broken down according to the customer type: consumer or enterprise. The consumer segment, as of 2020 made most of Udemy’s revenues, with over $326 million, and a gross profit of over $160 million. While the enterprise segment revenues were over $103 million with a gross profit of almost $68 million. It’s worth highlighting that Udemy’s enterprise offering has been rumped up in the last years, and therefore, we can expect a fast growth of that segment (Image Source: Udemy prospectus).

• Consumer-facing platform: on its core marketplace, Udemy adopts a strategy of aggressive promotion where courses get periodically and widely discounted. This enables the platform to reach a large number of potential customers, and convert many of the free users in paying customers. The transaction is mostly one-time. And customers can buy more courses, thus turning into repeat customers.
• Business/enterprise SaaS platform: at an enterprise level, Udemy for Busines is sold more as a sort of software as a service. The learning platform gives access to thousands of courses to team members.

As highlighted on Udemy’s website “The Udemy for Business instructor revenue model is different from the Udemy marketplace instructor revenue model.”

“While marketplace instructor revenue is calculated on the volume of course purchases and students’ lead sources for a given course, Udemy for Business instructor revenue is based on learner engagement or the total number of minutes consumed within an instructor’s course(s).”

In 2020, Udemy raised another $50 million in funding from the Japanese publishing house, Benesse, which valued the company $2 billion. As then-CEO Gregg Coccari highlighted “Udemy is on a mission to improve lives through learning, and so is Benesse. 2020 will be a milestone year where we serve millions of more students and enable thousands of businesses and governments to upskill their employees.”

Therefore, Udemy’s two-souls will widen in the coming years. On the one end, the consumer-facing platform, which is a critical element of Udemy’s overall success as a brand. A freemium-like model drives this.

And its enterprise side, driven by Udemy for Business, which follows more a SaaS model.

Udemy’s product overview, based on four main segments. 1. The Udemy consumer, where students can purchase courses individually, gives them lifetime access. 2. The consumer subscription, where students can individually purchase a subscription package that gives them access to most of the consumer courses available on the platform. 3. The team plan, which is the first offering for small and medium businesses, enables access to the platform for their teams. And the last tier, 4. the enterprise plan, for larger teams, and more advanced tools to monitor the learning process of employees (Image Credit: Udemy prospectus).

The main topic areas on Udemy are business, technology (development and data science), and personal development.

Udemy customers’ composition

Let’s dive into the Udemy customers’ composition from its financials, to understand what drives its brand, and what drives instead its revenue growth and profitability.

As Udemy points out “a buyer is a consumer who purchases a course or subscription through our direct-to-consumer.”For the years 2019 and 2020, Udemy recorded 962,000 and 1.4 million monthly average buyers. You can see the positive effect of the pandemic for online learning in the second quarter of 2020. The effect slowed down by 2021 as Udemy recorded 1.36 million monthly average buyers.

Udemy Business customers are defined as “a customer who purchases Udemy via its direct sales force, reseller partnerships or through the self-service platform.” This number will become increasingly important in the future to drive the profitability of the business. As of June 2021, Udemy had 8,669 business customers.

As of June 30, 2021, Udemy’s ARR from business students was $181.9 million.

While Udemy will keep pursuing consumers. It is pushing on its business/enterprise customer base for several reasons:

• Quickly improve revenue growth: as the enterprise customer base can work with larger and larger budgets, it becomes easier for the company to scale up its revenues.
• Create a seemingly more stable revenue stream: given the ability of enterprise customers to sustain a continuous expenditure for e-learning for its employees, it becomes easier for Udemy to build a continuous revenue stream, through subscription, which in the short-term seems more solid and can quickly improve the company’s valuation.
• Optimize the self-serving funnel: since most interactions on Udemy might start from the consumer-facing platform, by having qualified salespeople, it’s possible to identify those consumer accounts that can convert into enterprise accounts, thus further spurring the growth of the enterprise segment, in a relatively short time frame.

Why though it’s important for Udemy not to lose sight of its consumer base?

• Increasing sales acquisition costs: as the self-serving funnel is optimized, and the enterprise segment fully matures, it might become harder and harder to convert consumer accounts into enterprise ones. Therefore, over time without a solid, growing consumer-based it’s also hard to keep the enterprise segment growing.
• Devalued brand: focusing too much on the enterprise, in the long-term can cost the brand value, for a company that started as consumer-facing. That’s because the consumer-facing platform is not just a revenue stream, but it represents the company’s brand with the outside world. Thus, strengthening, and improving the consumer-facing platform is critical for the long-term success also of the enterprise business.
• Bottom-up approach: losing sight of the consumers-base, might result in other EdTech platforms taking over, as they follow a bottom-up acquisition approach. Where a large number of users are drawn into the platform, thus over time adopting it also as an enterprise solution. The risk, therefore, is to reduce the market size, as the enterprise niche becomes smaller and smaller.

Compare with other ed tech business model s

Coursera Business Model →Coursera is an American massive open online course (MOOC) provider founded by Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller in 2012.Duolingo Business Model →Duolingo is an EdTech platform leveraging gamification to enable millions of users to learn languages.Khan Academy Business Model →Khan Academy is an EdTech non- profit organization whose mission is “to provide a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere,” It runs thanks to…Udacit y Business Model →Udacity is a freemium EdTech platform, offering MOOCs (courses open to anyone for enrolment).Udemy Business Model →Udemy is an e-learning platform with two primary parts: the consumer-facing platform (B2C).Skillshare Business Model →Skillshare is an online learning community platform offering educational videos through subscriptions.Kahoot Business Model →ian game-based learning platform founded in 2012 by Johan Brand, Jamie Brooker, and Morten Versvik.

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