Ed-Tech Company Coursera Files To Go Public

Every new week or so brings new IPOs and a very notable company that has just hopped aboard the IPO…

Coursera logo

Every new week or so brings new IPOs and a very notable company that has just hopped aboard the IPO train is Coursera, the popular massive open online course provider founded out of Stanford University. 

Coursera has filed an S-1 document for an IPO with the SEC, giving a peek into its financials and business operations with information not publicly known before.

By the stats:

  • Coursera reported a record $294 million revenue in 2020, compared to $184 million in the previous year, 2019. 2020 was definitely a good year for the company as the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic spurred an upsized demand for online education services.
  • Coursera isn’t profitable, reporting respective net losses of $67 million and $47 million in 2020 and 2019. The company has a high Gross Profit rate, coming at nearly 50% in both 2020 and 2019 but has high expenses making it record net losses. Its highest expense for the past two years has been attributed to sales and marketing endeavors.
  • Coursera had 387 paying enterprise customers as of the end of 2020. The company had awarded a total of 11,900 degrees on its platform by the end of the same year.
  • In 2020, individual subscriptions for courses brought in $193 million in revenue for Coursera while enterprise subscriptions brought in $71 million, and $30 million came from online degree programs.
  • Coursera will list on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the symbol “COUR”.

A group of banks including the likes of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and UBS will underwrite Coursera’s IPO, and with an S-1 filing already dropped, a final public listing should be expected soon.

With its S-1 filing, Coursera has joined the handful of tech IPO candidates with public listings expected soon. They include ThredUp, the online clothes reseller; smart TV maker Vizio; mobile ad-tech company AppLovin; real estate listings platform Compass; cloud infrastructure provider DigitalOcean; and crypto exchange Coinbase.

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