Online education company Coursera went public today. I am not a finance person, so here is a brief summary from Bloomberg:

“The shares, which sold for $33 in the IPO, closed at $45 Wednesday in New York trading, giving the company a market value of $5.86 billion. Including employee stock options and restricted stock units, it would have a fully diluted valuation of $7.47 billion.”

Early this month, Coursera filed their Form S-1, indicating that the company planned to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “COUR”.

I analyzed the 240-page Form S-1 and summarized the important articles into a digestible 2,400 word summary. Here is a brief recap:

• Coursera’s revenue increased by 59% to $293.5M in 2020. Its losses increased to $66.8M, up from $46.7M in 2019.
• Since 2017, Coursera has paid $281M to its 200 university and industry partners.
• Half of the 2020 consumer revenue came from users registered before 2019.
• Coursera has 12k degree students enrolled across 25+ degrees.
• Their Consumer segment represented 65% of the revenue in 2020 but 90% in 2017.
• By late 2020, 3.2M learners had bought an offering and 50k were enrolled in Coursera Plus.

The whole article can be found here: Analyzing Coursera’s IPO Filing: $293.5M Revenue, $281M Paid to Partners, 12K Degree Students.

Class Central has been following the company right from the beginning (even before Coursera was called Coursera). The entire archive of our reporting can be found here: https://www.classcentral.com/report/tag/coursera/

If you are curious about how Coursera got to where they are now, I have described their monetization journey from 0 to $100+ million in revenue.  You can also read how the pandemic impacted Coursera and how they reacted to it in Coursera’s 2020: Year in Review.

Another major online platform, Udemy, is expected to go public this year. Earlier, I compared Coursera and Udemy on the basis of their catalog, business model, web traffic, and more. I also analyzed Udemy’s extensive catalog of 157k courses.