Udemy, a global marketplace for online courses, has raised a $65 million Series D led by Stripes Group, with participation from Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) and Insight Venture Partners. Stripes Group Founder and Managing Partner Ken Fox will join Udemy’s Board of Directors.
The Series D comes one year after a $32 million Series C and shortly after LinkedIn’s acquisition of Udemy’s main competitor, lynda.com for $1.5 billion.
This latest round brings the total funding raised by Udemy to $113 million. Udemy previously raised $32 million in May 2014, $12 million in November 2012, $3 million in October 2011, and $1 million in August 2010.
Founded in 2010, Udemy was set up as an alternative to market leader lynda.com. Other than the established platform that offers mainly in-house produced content from select instructors, Udemy chose a free marketplace approach, enabling anyone to launch and sell an online course on the platform.
To date, the marketplace offers 30.000 courses from 16.000 instructors with 2.000 new courses being added every month. Udemy claims to have attracted 7.000.000 learners from 190 countries, 30% of them learn on a mobile device.
50% of Udemy’s revenue is generated outside the U.S. which led to the opening of the company’s first overseas office in Dublin, Ireland, and the translation of the course catalog into seven different languages.
Udemy’s top instructors managed to rake in sizeable revenue from their online courses, ranging from $500.000 to $8 million, with the top ten instructors generating over $17 million in combined revenue.
Further Reading
Udemy raises $65 million to continue pioneering a global marketplace and disrupt the future of education | Press Release