Udemy - anyone could teach, and ninety-five thousand did

Eren Bali grew up in Durulova, a village in rural Turkey where the school could not teach him what he wanted to learn, and he learned it instead from software. The company he founded in San Francisco in May 2010 with Oktay Caglar and Gagan Biyani was the generalisation of that: a marketplace where anyone with something to teach could record it and sell it, with no institution in between. More than thirty investors turned the idea down as unserious. Within months a thousand instructors had published two thousand courses, on subjects from Photoshop to multivariable calculus.

That is the opposite model to Coursera's. There the university's name is the product and the platform is the channel; here the instructor is the product and the platform is the shelf. By 2025 the shelf held more than a quarter of a million courses in seventy-five languages, with over a billion enrolments, and a very large share of the world's practical technical training - the networking, the cloud, the security exam preparation - was being sold there by individuals who had never worked for a training company. The company listed on Nasdaq in October 2021.

The economics turned against the marketplace before the sale. Revenue was flat at around 790 million dollars in 2025, two-thirds of it now from enterprise subscriptions while the consumer marketplace shrank; the company reached profitability the same year it began putting advertising into free courses, none of the revenue going to the instructors whose courses carried it. Four executives left by year end, among them the founder, who had come back as chief technology officer. On 17 December 2025 the company agreed to be absorbed into Coursera, and in May 2026 it was. The name survives as a product line under someone else's ticker.

The record is worth keeping because the model was genuinely new and because its end says something about it. A shelf that anyone can put a course on is only worth what the courses on it are worth, and the people who made them were the last to be paid and the first to be asked to accept less. An instructor considering where to publish now has this history to read before deciding.