Coursera reported third-quarter revenue of $377 million, up 94% from a year earlier after the consolidation of Udemy, but the company’s underlying business remained under pressure. On a comparable basis that includes both companies’ results in the prior-year period, revenue fell about 3% year over year.
The result left Coursera with a split picture: much larger reported revenue after the merger, but no clear reversal in the decline of its pre-existing operations. As the initial integration phase moves forward, the company still needs to show that the combined platform can produce durable growth and profitability.
Reported growth was driven by consolidation
At the headline level, Coursera’s quarter looked strong. Revenue reached $377 million in the third quarter, a 94% increase from the same period last year. The main driver, however, was Udemy’s contribution after the merger was brought into the financial statements.
Using a comparable basis that includes both companies’ performance in the year-earlier period, revenue actually declined by about 3%. The company also said the decline widened from the previous quarter. That points to a business that has gained scale through the transaction but has not yet stabilized its original revenue base.
The figures also reflect broader pressure across online education. As the period of spending heavily for user growth has faded, platforms are dealing with tighter enterprise budgets and rising customer acquisition costs. Coursera’s combination with Udemy is part of that response.
Enterprise remains the largest segment, but customer count fell
Enterprise learning was Coursera’s biggest business in the quarter. Revenue from the segment came in at $201 million, accounting for 53% of total revenue. On a comparable basis, though, that business grew only 2%.
Enterprise customer count fell 4% year over year to 11,897, while net revenue retention was 93%. The segment is still the company’s main source of revenue, but the customer and retention data show that growth is not broad-based.
Pressure was more visible in the consumer business. Comparable consumer revenue declined 9% in the third quarter. Paid subscribers across the combined platform reached 1.687 million, up 30% year over year, but weakness in individual certificate subscriptions and one-time course purchases offset part of the subscription growth.
Enterprise and consumer subscription revenue together now account for nearly 90% of Coursera’s total revenue. That makes renewals, retention and ongoing willingness to pay more central to the company’s growth profile.
Margins improved as integration costs were cut
While revenue trends remained soft, cost integration started to show up in profitability metrics. Adjusted EBITDA reached $61.5 million in the third quarter, and margin rose to 16.3%, up 8.3 percentage points from a year earlier.
Since closing the merger in May, Coursera has streamlined its organizational structure, integrated sales teams and reduced overlapping functions. The company expects to deliver more than $150 million in annualized gross cost savings by year-end. Its original target of $115 million in annualized net synergies, initially expected within 24 months, could now be reached roughly eight months after closing.
Even so, merger-related and restructuring expenses pushed the company to a GAAP net loss of $25.6 million for the quarter.
Management remained cautious on near-term revenue. Coursera guided fourth-quarter revenue to $358 million to $366 million, below the third-quarter level. Comparable enterprise revenue is expected to be roughly flat, while the consumer business may slow further.
Product integration between Coursera and Udemy is still early
Cost integration has moved faster than product integration. Coursera and Udemy operate with different content supply models, and bringing them together remains an early-stage effort.
Coursera has long relied on universities, technology companies and professional institutions to develop courses. It now has more than 425 partners, with strengths in structured instruction, professional credentials and degree-related education. Udemy, by contrast, has nearly 100,000 instructors, mostly industry practitioners and professionals who can respond more quickly to changes in technology and job skills. Over the past year, Udemy added more than 5,000 instructors.
Each model has clear strengths and limits. Universities and professional institutions can provide more systematic knowledge frameworks and recognized credentials, but course development usually takes time. Individual instructors can launch new content quickly, but they are less able to cover a full professional capability path on their own. Coursera’s stated goal after the merger is to combine the two approaches, speeding up content refresh while keeping the benefits of structured teaching and certification.
Two cross-platform experiments were launched in the third quarter
Coursera said it has already started two cross-platform experiments aimed at bringing Udemy content and instructors into its broader ecosystem.
One example involves Udemy instructor Ryan Ahmed, who previously taught developer-focused technical courses on Udemy and has served hundreds of thousands of learners. After the merger, he adapted a series of Claude-related courses into a Coursera specialization. The company described it as one of the strongest-performing new courses on the platform in 2026. It is an early case of Udemy instructor content moving into Coursera’s course system.
The second experiment changes how learning content is organized. Coursera introduced AI Series learning paths that combine courses from different partners and have the content and sequence reviewed by practitioners in the relevant field. The product currently covers data analysis, business leadership, software development and cybersecurity, with expansion to more areas planned in the fourth quarter.
Instead of asking users to search for, buy and take courses one by one by topic, AI Series organizes content around specific career directions. A software developer, for example, can move through courses from different institutions in the order required by the role’s skill set. For now, those paths are still curated manually by professionals rather than assembled automatically for each learner.
New partners and certificates continue to expand the catalog
Coursera is also widening its content partnerships. At its FWD conference in September, the company announced 16 new university and industry partners and launched 25 professional certificates.
New partners include Harvard Business School Online, which offers courses in leadership and business strategy, and GitHub, which is developing courses in agentic AI and modern software development. In October, Anthropic added 10 Claude-related courses and said it plans monthly updates to keep pace with changes in AI technology and tools.
Those additions broaden the platform’s content coverage, while the cross-platform experiments test how existing courses and instructor resources can be reorganized into fuller learning paths. For the combined company, scale in courses and instructors is already there. The harder task is turning that scale into products built around the skills required for specific jobs.
Project Helix is aimed at skills identification and assessment
Alongside course integration, Coursera is adjusting its product direction. In September, the company first showed Project Helix, an AI-native skills platform that it plans to open broadly to enterprise customers in the first half of 2027.
Compared with a standard online course platform, Project Helix is designed around actual hiring and workforce needs inside companies. Coursera said it will combine skills identification, personalized learning, practical training and capability assessment in one system.
According to Coursera’s 2026 Global Skills Report, enrollment velocity for generative AI courses rose from 25 registrations per minute in 2025 to more than 40 per minute in 2026. Enrollment in critical thinking courses increased by more than 100% year over year. Coursera also cited a Deloitte survey showing that 43% of business leaders believe their organizations are fully prepared in AI infrastructure, while only 20% believe their talent is fully prepared.
Project Helix is intended to translate business goals into specific skill requirements, then generate learning paths based on an employee’s role, capability level and progress. Unlike traditional course platforms that mainly track learning time and course completion, the new platform is meant to use practical tasks, skills assessments and professional credentials to help companies judge whether employees can perform relevant work.
Some features are already in use, but revenue impact is not assumed
Project Helix is still being developed in stages, though some related functions have already been introduced.
Graded Role Play uses AI to simulate workplace scenarios such as business negotiations and assess communication and decision-making. Graded Labs tests technical ability through hands-on tasks, including deploying web applications. Coursera is also connecting learning products with tools such as ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot so employees can access training content based on real problems that arise in their work.
The platform is currently being refined with a group of enterprise customers, and a consumer version will come after the enterprise release. On the earnings call, management said it has not included any material revenue contribution from the new platform in its preliminary assumptions for early 2027.
The quarter showed progress on integration, not yet on renewed growth
Coursera’s latest results show that cost reduction after the Udemy merger is producing measurable gains, but revenue growth still faces pressure from enterprise customer attrition and softer consumer demand. The next phase for the company is whether it can use the combined base of courses, instructors and customers to build products that are more competitive than what either platform could offer on its own.
This article was adapted from the WeChat public account Duojing (ID: DJEDUINNO), written by Siluo.
