General IPO
October 6, 2021
5 minutes read

Markets: Ed-Tech Company Udemy Files For IPO

Udemy, a popular platform for online educational courses, is the latest tech company to begin the journey towards listing on…

Udemy, a popular platform for online educational courses, is the latest tech company to begin the journey towards listing on the public markets. It has filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in the US, where it’s based.

Udemy has unveiled an S-1 filing with the US SEC, showing its intent to list on the Nasdaq exchange. As usual, the S-1 document provides great insight into the ed-tech company’s business with information not publicly disclosed before.

Udemy is a vast marketplace for online courses covering many fields. It is primarily a marketplace and doesn’t employ teachers directly. It takes fees from courses sold on its platform as revenue.

The marketplace business for online education is apparently a very strong one, enough to pull in $430mn of revenue for Udemy in 2020, compared to $276mn in 2019. In the first half of 2021, Udemy made $251mn in revenue, up 24% year-over-year.

The pandemic of 2020 led to a boom in demand for online education, and it shows that Udemy’s annual sales jumped from $276mn in 2019 to $430mn in 2020, up 56% in a single year.

Udemy isn’t profitable and hasn’t been for the past two years, though its losses aren’t alarming relative to its revenue growth. The company posted a $78mn net loss in 2020 and $29mn in the first half of 2021.

Udemy plans to list on the Nasdaq exchange with the ticker symbol “UDMY”. The final terms of its IPO, including how much it wants to raise, have not yet been set.

Udemy was founded in 2009 and has grown to become one of the world’s leading online education platforms. Over the years, it has raised over $300mn in venture funding, last valued at $3.3bn by VCs.

The major stockholders listed in Udemy’s S-1 document include Insight Venture Partners (34%), Norwest Venture Partners (10%), and Stripes (5.6%). On the individual side, CEO Gregg Coccari is the biggest shareholder with a 2.5% stake, a good deal for a leader hired just over two years ago.