Coursera and edX decided that universities should teach the world. Udemy went further: it decided that anyone should be allowed to teach the world. No degree required, no institution backing you, no permission slip. A teenager with a camera, a retired plumber with forty years of tricks, a designer in Buenos Aires — all of them could publish a course and sell it to strangers across the globe. That single idea, pushed through a decade of rejection, controversy, and explosive growth, made Udemy one of the biggest education companies on the planet. Here are the five turning points that made it happen.
Turning point 1: A village kid and a dream (2007–2009)
Eren Bali grew up in a small village in Turkey with almost no access to quality education. What he did get was a computer — and the internet did the rest. He taught himself mathematics online, well enough to win a silver medal in the International Math Olympiad. That experience rewired his brain: if a kid in rural Turkey could learn from the internet, why couldn’t everyone?
In 2007, Bali and his friend Oktay Caglar built a live virtual classroom while still living in Turkey. It was rough, but it worked. Two years later they moved to Silicon Valley, and in early 2010 they founded Udemy with a third co-founder, Gagan Biyani. The pitch was radical for the time: don’t build courses — build a marketplace where anyone can create and sell courses. YouTube, but for learning.
Turning point 2: Thirty rejections and a bootstrap (2010)
Here’s the part startup folklore loves: in February 2010, the founders tried to raise venture capital and were rejected 30 times. Investors didn’t believe a marketplace of amateur courses could work. Who would pay for a class taught by a nobody?
So the founders bootstrapped. They built the product themselves and launched Udemy in May 2010 — no funding, no safety net. And the market answered fast: within a few months, 1,000 instructors had created about 2,000 courses. By August 2010, investors came around with $1 million in venture funding. The marketplace model worked because it solved a supply problem nobody else was touching: there are far more people with something to teach than there are professors.
By the early 2010s, Udemy’s catalog was exploding in every direction — programming, photography, music, business, personal development. If a skill could be recorded, someone was selling a course about it. Prices were chaotic and often discounted to a few dollars, but volume made up for it.
Turning point 3: The piracy scandal (2015)
Growth brought a dark side. In November 2015, Udemy was hit with a major controversy: instructors discovered that pirated versions of their courses — including ripped-off content from other platforms — were being sold on the marketplace, with Udemy taking a cut. The backlash was fierce. Creators who had trusted the platform felt betrayed, and the story made Udemy look like it cared more about catalog size than creator rights.
To its credit, the company responded. In 2018 it expanded its anti-piracy efforts through a partnership with Link-Busters, a content protection firm, and built better systems for detecting stolen content. The scandal never fully went away — open marketplaces always struggle with this — but Udemy survived it, and the episode forced the company to take creator trust seriously.
Turning point 4: The pandemic and the unicorn (2020)
Then came the moment that changed everything. When COVID-19 shut down the world in 2020, online course enrollment on Udemy surged 425% amid lockdowns. Millions of people suddenly stuck at home decided to learn new skills — coding, baking, investing, languages. Udemy’s catalog, the broadest and weirdest of any platform, was exactly what a bored, anxious world wanted.
The company crossed into unicorn territory in 2020 with a $3.25 billion valuation after raising a total of $273 million from investors including Tencent. Udemy also leaned hard into its second business: Udemy Business, a subscription product that sells curated course libraries to companies for employee training. The enterprise side grew fast — by early 2022, enterprise revenue was growing over 80% year over year — and it became the company’s most reliable engine.
The leadership changed too. Co-founder Eren Bali stepped down as CEO in 2014, succeeded by COO Dennis Yang; in 2019 the board appointed Gregg Coccari as CEO to steer the company toward the public markets.
Turning point 5: The IPO and the hard years (2021–2025)
On October 29, 2021, Udemy went public on the Nasdaq at a valuation of around $4 billion. It was the culmination of an eleven-year journey from a bootstrapped experiment to a public company. Like Coursera before it, Udemy had never turned a profit — its accumulated deficit was $407.9 million — but the market bought the growth story.
The years after the IPO were rougher. In 2023, Coccari retired and Greg Brown took over as CEO. In 2024, Udemy cut the percentage of revenue going to instructors — the academic labor that built the platform — and laid off 30% of its employees, announcing plans to hire in lower-cost regions. Co-founder Eren Bali returned as chief technology officer in August 2024, a homecoming that briefly energized longtime observers, before being replaced in 2025.
The marketplace that democratized teaching is now wrestling with the same question every platform faces: how do you keep growing without squeezing the people who made you?
What Udemy proved
Whatever its stumbles, Udemy’s core idea won. Today the platform hosts well over 150,000 courses, and the idea that anyone can teach — not just professors, not just experts with credentials — is completely mainstream. Every creator selling a course on any platform is living in the world Udemy built.
Thinking about teaching yourself? Read Udemy vs selling on your own site for the honest trade-offs, how to plan your first online course step by step, and how to price your course without guessing. And if you’re coming from a traditional career, teaching what you know online might be your second act.
