In one of the biggest global consolidations in the edtech sector, Coursera and Udemy announced on December 17 a $2.5 billion all-stock merger, bringing together two of the world’s most influential online learning companies to form a single, AI-native skills platform. The combined entity is expected to generate over $1.5 billion in annual revenue and realise $115 million in synergies within two years. Post acquisition, Coursera CEO Greg Hart will lead the merged entity as CEO.
For Hart, the deal is as much about timing as scale. “The space that both Coursera and Udemy are part of is the broader education sector,” he says. “That includes every university, every school, and all the workforce development programmes globally. It’s a massive, massive market.” Yet within that landscape, he notes, online platforms remain “a small drop in the bucket”.
What is shifting rapidly is how people learn. “Learning is evolving incredibly fast—with people using LLMs, or turning to Google, YouTube, TikTok,” Hart says. The merger aims to create a platform that not only keeps pace with these shifts but anticipates them.
Brand integration will be managed carefully. “Over time, everything will come under the Coursera brand and one platform,” Hart explains. “But Udemy is a strong brand, and we believe it still has an important role within the overall offering.” The companies’ distinct strengths—Coursera’s academic partnerships and Udemy’s dynamic instructor marketplace—will remain central.
In an exclusive conversation with Forbes India, Hart talks about the thought behind the merger, what it means for India, and how AI is reshaping the future of learning. Edited excerpts
Q. How did the acquisition come about, and what are your plans?
In many ways the two companies are highly complementary. Coursera is two-thirds consumer in terms of revenue, Udemy is two-thirds enterprise. We have a more North America-focussed business, they have a more internationally focussed one. Obviously, for both of us, North America and international markets are important, but we felt the combination was really powerful.
The final piece is content. All the courses on Coursera started with our university partners like Stanford, Yale and Michigan. Then we brought on industry partners like Google, DeepLearning.AI, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM and Adobe. Udemy has a marketplace of dynamic instructors—over 85,000 of them—rapidly creating content.
We felt that combining the two businesses would offer every learner more choice through a much broader catalogue. It would offer our enterprise customers the ability to upskill and reskill their learners at a faster pace. And it enables us, as a combined company, to invest more and innovate more quickly—keep improving every part of the learner experience, build better tools for content creators and instructors.
Q. How do you plan to integrate Udemy’s AI-powered, micro-learning capabilities with Coursera’s AI partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic?
A lot of that work will happen between now and the closing of the acquisition. Combined, we have 191 million registered learners, and Udemy has more than 82 million; so together that’s over a quarter of a billion people we can expose all this content to. But it’s not just about reach.
We want to make it easier for instructors to create courses that are more engaging, more interactive, more modular, and deliver better outcomes for learners. That will be a major focus for the two companies.
Q. How does this affect your India plans?
India is an incredibly important market for Coursera; it’s our second-largest market by learners after the US, with more than 32 million learners. It’s also a really important market for Udemy. We have a broad catalogue of content available, not just in English but in Hindi and other languages, as do they. We believe that bringing the two together offers learners in India far more choice. And this comes at a critical time, because of the opportunity in India.
There are studies from Ernst & Young and others about the potential of AI to transform India. One EY statistic notes that AI could impact 38 million jobs in India by 2030, yet only 3 percent of enterprises currently have the talent required to fully leverage AI. So, it’s critical that enterprises upskill and reskill their workforce.
That’s one of the reasons I speak about our focus on continuing to grow our range of AI courses—they have more than doubled year over year—as well as deepening those courses and improving their outcomes. This creates an opportunity for us to go even deeper in India and invest more.
Q. Given the post-Byju’s slowdown in India’s edtech landscape, how do you assess the road ahead?
The sector has had some companies that relied too much on debt and, therefore, faced challenges. Thankfully, we don’t have that issue. Coursera has no debt on its balance sheet; we have $798 million of cash. The combination of the two companies creates an organisation that—before any synergies—generated $1.5 billion of revenue with EBITDA margins of roughly 10 percent. Combined, we’d have more than $1.1 billion of cash, with no debt. So, it’s a very healthy balance sheet. We believe this puts us in a strong position to invest at a faster pace, and increase EBITDA margin to around 20 percent.
Q. How will the merger strengthen Coursera, especially for your investors?
It’s compelling from an investor perspective, because of the numbers I just outlined. We’ll be able to create a single integrated platform with content not just from our 375 universities and industry partners, but also from Udemy’s 85,000 instructors. That combination is going to be unmatched. It gives consumers access to a phenomenal catalogue. On the investment side, both companies have R&D teams working on very similar things. We’ll be able to bring them together and innovate faster, because we won’t need to build two separate versions of everything.
We expect this to drive faster innovation, and hopefully faster growth. The potential for stronger growth, a better margin profile, and a better bottom line should be something investors appreciate.
Q. Do you expect regulators to scrutinise any aspect of the merger?
My perspective is that we operate in a massive market—more than $2 trillion if you look at the entire global education sector—and the combined companies have $1.5 billion of revenue. We do not have an outsized market power by any stretch. I expect regulators will look at things they always examine: How consumers are impacted, how pricing power is impacted, and so on. So, we’re not concerned about regulatory approval.
Q. Combined, what market share would Coursera and Udemy have globally?
Within the broader education market—which is potentially $2 trillion plus—we would have $1.5 billion. That’s an unbelievably small market share within education.
Within the edtech segment, there aren’t many great estimates of the market size, partly because so many companies are private. For example, LinkedIn—one of the larger competitors—is owned by Microsoft, so it’s hard to know their revenue. But we’re confident that, competitively, we don’t have any outsized market power. Every country has many regional players. Physics Wallah, for instance, just went public in India, and there are many others in every country. It’s not just global players; it’s local and regional ones too.
Q.What are the key points for driving growth and opportunity for Coursera in the next five years?
The biggest key for us—and for the combined company—is that the learning experience, what people expect from education, and what’s needed in the workforce are all reorienting around skills. This is true for Coursera and will remain true for the combined company.
We want to guide people to the right skills for their desired career, help them gain those skills, and enable them to show verified assessment and mastery of those skills in the workforce. It’s critical from an employer perspective to know that you’re hiring someone with demonstrable skills or upskilling your workforce effectively.
First Published: Dec 23, 2025, 14:33
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