After merging with Udemy, global online education giant Coursera welcomed a quarter in which revenue nearly doubled.
Big companies are all cutting budgets—how can online education still make money? On October 29, Coursera delivered a contradictory report card: thanks to the Udemy merger, revenue ostensibly surged 94%; but if you strip away the surface of the data, its core subscription revenue is actually shrinking. This giant is using "puffiness" to mask "exhaustion."
Looking at the data alone, revenue reached $377 million, up 94% year-over-year—a very impressive result. But a deeper breakdown of the financial statement structure reveals that this growth mainly stems from the consolidation effect. On a comparable basis, its actual revenue declined by about 3% year-over-year.
On one side is the substantial lift in reported revenue; on the other is pressure on the core foundation. After completing the initial integration of the two major platforms, Coursera urgently needs to prove to the capital markets its ability to sustain profitability and growth.
The "two sides" of the data: revenue doubles, but why is the foundation still under pressure?
Coursera's substantial revenue growth this time mainly comes from Udemy's consolidation contribution.
In the third quarter, the company's revenue reached $377 million, up 94% year-over-year. But on a comparable basis including both companies' performance in the same period, revenue actually declined by about 3% year-over-year, with the decline further widening from the previous quarter. This shows that although the merger expanded Coursera's revenue scale, it has not yet reversed the downward trend of the original business.
In fact, this report card from Coursera reflects the deep-water game across the entire global online education industry. After the traffic era of "burning money for growth" came to an end, even education giants must rely on "huddling together for warmth" to cope with shrinking B-end budgets and rising customer acquisition costs. Merging with Udemy is precisely the card Coursera played to build its moat.
From the perspective of specific businesses, corporate training has become Coursera's largest source of revenue. In the third quarter, this business generated $201 million in revenue, accounting for 53% of total revenue, but comparable revenue grew only 2%. At the same time, the number of enterprise customers decreased by 4% year-over-year to 11,897, and the net revenue retention rate was 93%. 11,897 enterprise customers—this churn figure is more dangerous than it appears on the surface. The hardest-hit area of churn is small and medium-sized enterprises. This exposes a fatal weakness after the merger: Coursera focuses on systematization and high ticket prices, while small and medium-sized enterprises that were used to Udemy's cheap, fragmented courses will, once faced with economic cyclical fluctuations, be the first to cut Coursera's "heavy-investment" training. Blind merger did not bring 1+1>2 customer retention. The B-end foundation is churning, and the C-end is not doing well either.
Pressure on the consumer business is even more obvious. In the third quarter, comparable revenue for this business declined 9% year-over-year. Although paid subscribers after the merger reached 1.687 million, up 30% year-over-year, the personal certificate subscription and one-time course purchase businesses continued to come under pressure, offsetting part of the subscription growth. At present, corporate and consumer subscription revenue together account for nearly 90% of Coursera's total revenue. As the revenue structure concentrates toward the subscription model, customer renewals, user retention, and the ability to continue paying have also become important factors affecting the company's growth. In addition to revenue pressure on the B-end and C-end, the cost improvements brought by the merger have already emerged.
In the third quarter, compared with the weakness on the revenue side, Coursera's adjusted EBITDA—the cost improvements brought by the merger have already emerged. In the third quarter, Coursera's adjusted EBITDA reached $61.5 million, with margin rising to 16.3%, up 8.3 percentage points from the same period last year. Since completing the merger in May, the company has successively streamlined its organizational structure, integrated sales teams, and cut duplicate functions. It is expected to achieve more than $150 million in annualized total cost savings by the end of the year. The original plan to achieve $115 million in annualized net synergy within 24 months is expected to be reached about eight months after closing. However, affected by merger- and restructuring-related expenses and other factors, the company still recorded a GAAP net loss of $25.6 million for the quarter.
Progress in cost integration has not changed management's cautious expectations for short-term revenue. Coursera expects fourth-quarter revenue of $358 million to $366 million, below the third-quarter level. Among them, comparable revenue from the enterprise business is expected to be roughly flat, while the consumer business may slow further.
For post-merger Coursera, cost reduction has achieved phased results, but revenue growth still faces pressures such as enterprise customer churn and weak consumer willingness to pay. How to use the courses, instructors, and customer resources accumulated by the two platforms to develop more competitive products has become the problem the company needs to solve next.
Integration pains: the two major platforms' "genetic recombination"—can 1+1 be greater than 2?
Cost integration is progressing rapidly, but the product-level integration of Coursera and Udemy is still in its early stages. The essence of this "cost reduction and efficiency improvement" is to dress up the income statement by cutting labor costs. But cutting expenditure cannot hide the incompetence of generating revenue; saving money alone cannot support the growth ambitions of a tech giant.
Coursera's real trouble is that its underlying business logic is completely different from Udemy's. The former is more like a "degree and certification system," emphasizing rigor and long cycles; the latter is more like a "fast-food-style skills supermarket," with fast updates but lacking depth. How to fit these two types of instructors and two systems into one basket and generate true synergies is the hardest bone to chew after the merger.
This choice is related to the content supply models of the two companies. Coursera has long relied on universities, tech companies, and professional institutions to develop courses. It currently has more than 425 partners, with advantages concentrated in systematic teaching, professional certification, and degree education. Udemy, by contrast, has nearly 100,000 instructors, mainly industry practitioners and professionals providing courses, and can respond more quickly to technological updates and changes in job skills. Over the past year, Udemy added more than 5,000 instructors, further expanding the supply of vocational skills courses.
The two models each have advantages and also different limitations. Universities and professional institutions can provide relatively systematic knowledge systems and qualification certifications, but course development usually requires a certain cycle; individual instructors can quickly launch new content, but it is difficult for them to independently cover complete vocational ability training needs. After the merger, Coursera hopes to combine the two types of content, both increasing the speed of course updates and retaining the advantages of professional teaching and certification.
In the third quarter of this year, Coursera has already launched two cross-platform experiments.
One of them comes from Udemy instructor Ryan Ahmed. He previously taught technical courses for developers on Udemy, serving hundreds of thousands of learners cumulatively. After the merger, he adapted a series of Claude-related courses into a specialization on Coursera, becoming one of the platform's most outstanding new courses in 2026. This is also an early attempt to bring Udemy instructor content into Coursera's course system, indicating that the two platforms have begun exploring shared instructor resources and content distribution channels.
Another experiment directly changed the way courses are organized. Coursera launched the AI Series learning paths, combining courses from different partners and having practitioners in relevant fields review the content and learning order. At present, the product covers directions such as data analytics, business leadership, software development, and cybersecurity, and plans to expand to more fields in the fourth quarter.
Unlike searching, purchasing, and learning separately by course topic, AI Series organizes content around specific career directions. For example, software developers can learn courses from different institutions in sequence according to the skills required for the role, without having to judge the connections and learning order among courses themselves. At present, these paths mainly rely on professional screening and arrangement, and automated combination for different learners has not yet been achieved.
At the same time, Coursera is also expanding the scope of content cooperation. At the FWD conference in September this year, the company announced the addition of 16 university and industry partners and the launch of 25 professional certificates. New partners include Harvard Business School Online, which offers leadership and business strategy courses, and GitHub, which develops courses on agentic AI and modern software development. In October, Anthropic added 10 more Claude-related courses and plans to update them monthly to keep up with changes in AI technology and tools.
These new courses have expanded the platform's content coverage, while cross-platform experiments further explore how to use existing resources. For post-merger Coursera, the number of courses and instructors has already reached scale. How to organize scattered content into complete learning paths according to the skill requirements of different roles has become the focus of product integration.
At present, Coursera still mainly relies on manual work to complete course screening, adaptation, and combination. Through these dazzling collaborations, it is not hard to see Coursera's anxiety: trying to use extremely high labor costs to manually stitch together the differences between the two systems. In the AI era, this "human-wave tactic" simply cannot support huge revenue targets in the long run. The real cure may be exactly the AI-native platform Project Helix that they plan to apply in 2027—allowing the system to automatically arrange learning and assessment according to enterprise needs.
Betting on the future: from "selling courses" to "verifying skills"—is the new AI story easy to tell?
While course resources are accelerating integration, Coursera is also readjusting its product direction.
In September this year, the company showcased for the first time the AI-native skills platform Project Helix, planning to open it broadly to enterprise customers in the first half of 2027. Compared with existing online course platforms, Project Helix will pay more attention to enterprises' actual hiring needs, integrating skill identification, personalized learning, practical training, and capability assessment into the same platform.
This adjustment is closely related to changes in skill demand in the AI era. Coursera's 2026 Global Skills Report shows that the enrollment rate for generative AI courses has grown from 25 per minute in 2025 to more than 40 per minute in 2026, and enrollment in critical thinking courses has increased by more than 100% year-over-year. At the same time, a Deloitte survey cited by Coursera shows that 43% of enterprise managers believe their organizations are fully prepared in terms of AI technology infrastructure, but only 20% believe talent is fully prepared. As enterprises increase AI investment, they also need employees to master the ability to apply technology to actual business.
In response to this demand, Project Helix translates enterprises' business goals into specific skill requirements, then combines employees' roles, capability levels, and learning progress to generate corresponding learning paths. Unlike traditional course platforms that mainly record learning hours and course completion, the new platform will also use practical tasks, skill assessments, and professional certifications to help enterprises determine whether employees are competent for the relevant work.
Unlike traditional course platforms that only record "learning duration," Coursera has bet on Project Helix, which won't land until 2027, attempting to do "talent assessment." But this is tantamount to snatching food from the tiger's mouth. When it comes to assessing employee skills, a company's own HR and business supervisors have the most say. Coursera wants to set standards as a third-party platform—why would enterprises pay for it? What's more, free AI tools and assessment systems are now everywhere on the market. Can the capital market's patience still hold out for a vision that won't take shape until three years from now to prop up its valuation?
Some related features have already been put into application. For example, Graded Role Play uses AI to simulate work scenarios such as business negotiations, assessing learners' communication and decision-making performance; Graded Labs tests technical capabilities through real operational tasks, including deploying web applications. In addition, the company is pushing to connect its learning products with tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot, enabling employees to access courses and training content based on actual problems at work, further integrating learning into daily work.
However, Project Helix is still in a phased development stage, currently being refined together with some enterprise customers, and the consumer version will be launched after the enterprise version. Management explicitly stated on the earnings call that a significant revenue contribution from the new platform has not yet been included in the preliminary performance assumptions for 2027.
Coursera's adjustments also provide a reference for domestic vocational education and corporate training institutions.
With the spread of AI tools, the cost of course development and content updates continues to decrease, and attracting customers solely by the number of courses and price will become more difficult. Rather than increasing course supply, developing practical training projects around specific job positions, establishing skill assessment standards, and helping enterprises measure employees' actual performance after training will become important directions for vocational training institutions to expand enterprise customers and improve renewal rates.
Coursera's earnings report is actually a microcosm of the entire online education industry entering deep waters. When "selling courses" hits a growth ceiling, how to deeply bind education with real industry needs (such as AI skills) is a hurdle it must cross. The merger is only the beginning, but the time left for it to trial and error is actually running short.
This article comes from the WeChat public account "Duojing" (ID: DJEDUINNO), author: Siluo
