Udemy’s Journey in the Skill- Based Economy.

Source: Google images

“Democratizing knowledge for both individuals and businesses”- Udemy’s goal.

Udemy, an E-learning platform, has been enhancing the competitive Edutech market with its unchanging goal of making knowledge accessible and affordable to everyone at their ease. With its innovative and sustainable technology, passion, creativity and teamwork Udemy has been successfully driving the economy with its services.

Introduction

Udemy was founded in 2010 by Eren Bali, Oktay Caglar and Gagan Biyani in San Francisco. Udemy is an E-learning platform providing opportunity to instructors to teach any course in any language and students to learn from many topics, skill levels and languages. Currently, most of the courses are based on practical subjects like Excel, AWS, Personal Transformation etc. 

Origin of Udemy

Source: Google images 

Eren Bali was born in a village in the Southeast part of Turkey. There he faced difficulties in getting qualitative education because in the village there was only one primary school which was of One room, one teacher based model school. Due to that 80% of the time he had to opt for self-education. With the help of his sister’s computer Eren learned all the concepts of maths and even was able to win a gold medal in Turkey National Olympiad and a silver medal in International Maths Olympiad. Eren Bali chose computer science for higher education. In his last year of college, he started an educational company with Oktay Caglar where they built a software for providing live education in Turkey. They made the software with all the advanced features they could, but after its launch it was clear to them that it would not work. Two major reasons were that: It still took 10 minutes for the instructor to set up the microphone and camera, and Turkey was not the right place. Eren after shutting the company moved to the United States and started working there as a developer. After working for a few years in the U.S.A, still being  passionate about Youtube he and his co-founder started rebuilding Udemy.

Business Model of Udemy

Udemy was initially operated through a website and then in 2013 an application was launched by it. It offers free as well as paid courses. By adopting the free course model it generates value and goodwill in marketing through word of mouth. On the other hand, principal revenue is earned by the fee charged from students as well as instructors for organizing courses. If the course is promoted by the platform then 50% of the total fees is held by the platform and the rest 50% is earned by the instructors. If the instructor himself/herself is promoting the course, then the whole fee goes in the hands of the instructor. Apart from Business-to-customer [B2C] business model, Udemy also has Business-to-business [B2B] where three plans for companies are available under ‘Udemy Business’, they are: Team Plan, Enterprise Plan and Leadership Academy. 

Raising of funds

The journey of Udemy faced difficulties in the beginning when it required funds. Many investors turned down, facing an issue: Who will pay for an e-learning course?,  They should offer it for free, etc… But the founders believed in themselves that they were on the right path. They included many other various courses and decided to establish a bootstrap company. Soon the website started getting visitors and in a few months of its launch, Udemy had 1000 instructors creating around 2000 courses and about 10,000 registered users. Anyways, it was not still easy to get an investor on board, but still after a lot of efforts finally the first investment of $50k was raised by the Udemy.  

Funding rounds- After having positive market responses, Udemy raised $1 million in venture funding by August, 2010. After that an amount of $ 3 million was raised in the next year. Followed by $12 million in the next year, then $32 million and so on. As of November, 2020 Udemy has raised a total amount of $273 million. In the year 2021, the company was listed under the symbol UDMY for their IPO [Initial Public Offering] in the U.S.

Udemy’s Growth

Udemy has been able to grow from 1000 instructors to 80k instructors till now. Around 250k courses have been available on it. Udemy is now able to provide its service in 75 languages. Around 77 million learners are availing its services. In 2015, Udemy expanded its reach by launching Udemy Business, catering to the needs of the organizations for training and development of employees. 17.1k businesses have been customers of Udemy. Udemy has achieved $787 million in revenue in 2024. On an average 1.3 million buyers have been increased in a month. Udemy’s large customer net dollar retention rate has been 103%. A research and development centre in Chennai has been established which has driven its growth by enhancing courses on its platform, leveraging local talent and helping to meet specific needs of the Indian market.  As the pace of innovation accelerates, many organizations are grappling with how to address the widening skills gap, which is projected to in turn cause a talent gap shortage of 85 million workers by 2030. To help bridge these gaps and build a more agile workforce, Udemy identified 3 critical areas of investment as companies begin business planning for the year ahead:

1. Take a skills-based approach.
2. Adapt to advances in generative AI.
3. Develop strong leaders.

On 12 March, 2025 Udemy announced Hugo Sarrazin- experienced SaaS and AI veteran as Chief Executive Officer.

Revenue

Udemy’s revenue was $276 million in 2019 which increased to $430 million in 2020 with a growth rate of 35%. In 2021 it was recorded $515 million with a growth rate of 20%. $629 million in 2022 with an annual growth rate of 18%. Around  $729 million in 2023. In 2024 around 7% growth rate had been achieved with $787 million revenue. Udemy has earned twice the revenue during Covid-19 times, as the world was resting in their homes for months. Still after 2020, Udemy has been growing at its own pace.

Source: Udemy 

Future plan

As organizations continue to embrace the promise of generative AI and other fast-evolving innovations, there is also intense disruption — disruption in employee roles, in how work gets done and in the nature of the work itself,” said Melissa Daimler, Chief Learning Officer at Udemy. “Change leadership is essential. Developing skills like resilience and leading through change are even more important to reinforce as we navigate and embrace these disruptions.” Udemy wants to contribute in bringing the best leaders out of the world. Udemy is constantly working towards integrating AI and enhancing the experience of the users. Hence, including Udemy AI is their recent focusing goal. Promotion of skill based economy and its smooth implementation is what Udemy focuses on the businesses.

Achievements of Udemy

1. In April, 2015 Udemy got included in San Francisco Business Times.
2. Udemy was awarded for Best Places to Work in the Bay area in April, 2015.
3. Udemy was shortlisted for ‘Best International Newcomer’ award in 17th Dot IE Net Visionary Awards in October, 2015.  
4. In April, 2016 Udemy surpassed 10 million students.
5. In 2016, Instructor Ahmed Alkabary was awarded a scholarship from the Linux Foundation.
6. CEO Dennis Yang of Udemy received EY Entrepreneur of the year 2016 in Tech-enabled service category. 
7. In January, 2025 Udemy got included on Built In’s prestigious annual list of Best Places to work for 2025.  

Conclusion

Udemy’s persistence from its launch has been commendable. Its passion for making skills, knowledge, experiences, learning accessible to all, with its commitment to sustainability has curated a successive path for itself. From not being able to get qualitative education to making it available online across different nations has positioned its unique understanding among learners. Its powerful base for customer support, sustainable technological practices, and cooperation with businesses has brought it to a position of global learning platform. Being successful is common in recent times but planning a long term success with sustainability and making efforts to implement it, makes Udemy stand out in the economy.

FAQs 

Q-1 What is Udemy?

Ans. Udemy is an E-learning platform providing courses across a wide range of categories, some of which are business, entrepreneurship, arts, music, language and more!

Q-2 Are Udemy courses available at free of cost?

Ans. Some of the courses are free of cost, the rest other courses charge affordable fees.

Q-3 Where can I access Udemy?

Ans. You can access your Udemy courses from various platforms and devices, on both laptop as well as mobile.

Q-4 Who is the CEO of Udemy?

Ans. Hugo Sarrazin is the CEO and President of Udemy.

Q-5 Do I have to start or complete my course by a certain time?

Ans. There are no deadlines to begin or complete a course.