Udemy
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| Founded | 2010 |
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| Key people | Dennis Yang (CEO) |
| Industry | e-learning |
| Website | udemy |
| Alexa rank |
 465 (February 2017[update]) |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Current status | Active |
Udemy.com is an online learning platform. It is aimed at professional adults who want to add new skills to their resumes, or explore their passions. Unlike academic MOOC programs driven by traditional collegiate coursework, Udemy provides a platform for experts of any kind to create courses which can be offered to the public, either at no charge or for a tuition fee. Udemy provides tools which enable users to create a course, promote it and earn money from student tuition charges.
No Udemy courses are currently credentialed for college credit; students take courses largely as a means of improving job-related skills. Some courses generate credit toward technical certification. Udemy has made a special effort to attract corporate trainers seeking to create coursework for employees of their company.
In 2010, Udemy was hosting around 400 courses. As of 2017, there are more than 45,000.
In 2007, Udemy founder Eren Bali built software for a live virtual classroom while living in Turkey. He saw potential in making the product free for everyone, and moved to Silicon Valley to found a company two years later. The site was launched by Bali, Oktay Caglar and Gagan Biyani in early 2010.
In February 2010, the founders tried to raise venture capital funding, but the idea failed to impress investors and they were rejected 30 times, according to Gagan Biyani. In response to this, they bootstrapped the development of the product and launched Udemy—"The Academy of You"—in May 2010.
Within a few months, 1,000 instructors had created about 2,000 courses, and Udemy had nearly 10,000 registered users. Based on this favorable market reaction, they decided to attempt another round of financing, and raised $1 million in venture funding by August. This sum was significantly more than they had originally sought when approaching investors just months earlier.
In October 2011, the company raised an additional $3 million in Series A funding led by Groupon investors Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell, as well as 500 Startups and MHS Capital.
In December 2012, the company raised $12 million in Series B funding led by Insight Venture Partners, as well as Lightbank Capital, MHS Capital and Learn Capital, bringing Udemy’s total funding to $16 million.
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