Article Summary
Udemy's Q3 2025 results show revenue guidance beat and a fifteenth consecutive quarter of better-than-expected adjusted EBITDA. This article covers subscription growth, AI platform strategy, Certification and Career Journeys, and key partnerships. Readers will gain a clear picture of Udemy's financial momentum and strategic direction.
This blog is adapted from remarks shared by me on October 29, 2025 and represents our views as of that date. For more details regarding Udemy’s results for Q3 2025, including our earnings news release and archived webcast, visit the “Quarterly Results” section of Udemy’s Investor Relations website.
I am proud of the Udemy team for making solid progress during this quarter on our priority to accelerate subscription revenue growth across the entire business.
In Q3, we beat our revenue guidance and delivered our fifteenth consecutive quarter of better-than-expected adjusted EBITDA. Consolidated subscription revenue grew 8% year-over-year and now makes up 74% of total revenue. We are building a more durable business that delivers predictable, recurring revenue that creates more value for all stakeholders. In our Consumer segment, we surpassed our full-year paid subscribers target and revenue from subscriptions increased an impressive 43% year-over-year.
When people subscribe instead of just purchasing one course, they engage more, learn more, and realize better career outcomes. Subscription customers are our best customers. That’s why growing that piece of our business faster is our top priority and we are seeing strong momentum across both segments.
Udemy’s Skills-Building Engine
Our market position is built on a unique strategic foundation of two businesses – each independently compelling and highly complementary. We combine the depth and stickiness of enterprise relationships with the breadth and innovation velocity of a global consumer marketplace.
On the Enterprise side, companies are heavily investing in AI transformation. However, they are struggling to demonstrate ROI because many haven’t developed the core workforce capabilities required to extract value from their investments.
On the Consumer side, we’re addressing a different but complementary need. Individual learners must become AI-native and require comprehensive support that leads to career advancement.
To meet the needs of both organizations and individuals, a skills acceleration platform must deliver measurable outcomes. There are four critical pillars of Udemy’s platform, which bring the best of AI and humans together to deliver impactful results. These include:
- Skills acquisition – through course collections tailored for specific roles.
- Skills mastery – through hands-on practice using labs, workspaces, and Role Play experiences.
- Skills validation – through assessments and certifications, and
- Skills amplification – through human connection and expert guidance.
Our integrated approach transforms learning from a one-time event into a continuous skill-building engine that delivers strong ROI and learner outcomes. Our platform features AI learning paths, an AI Assistant, AI-generated assessments, AI-assisted content creation, and MCP capabilities.
Udemy enables organizations to build their own content and custom paths, develop their own AI Role Plays, and deliver just-in-time reskilling through integration with their existing LLMs, and their LMS and LXP systems, creating stickiness.
Extending Beyond LLMs
We are in the midst of the most important workforce evolution in generations, with nearly 60% of global professionals needing new skills by 2030. Udemy is aiming to be the natural extension to traditional education, bridging the gap from what a learner already knows to the new skills the market demands.
While LLMs excel at answering questions, Udemy excels at changing behaviors and building skills that drive real impact. We do this through structured learning journeys with measurable progress, human expertise, and community support that learners cannot get from AI alone. We are building an enterprise-grade workflow integration that embeds seamlessly into how organizations operate that translates into business outcomes and career advancement.
Our comprehensive platform also enables organizations to manage talent development strategies, track progress against their strategy, and validate company-wide skills proficiency with proprietary data to support meaningful outcomes.
For consumers, we are embedding personalized learning experiences into our subscription offerings to support career transformations. We will enable skill acquisition through engaging experiences and validation through assessments and other services that lead to mastery and, ultimately, better career outcomes.
The future of work requires continuous skills development and AI makes that need more urgent, not less relevant. We enable all customers to stay ahead of rapidly evolving skill demands through adaptive, just-in-time learning. We are positioning Udemy to be an essential lifelong learning solution for professionals that drives career advancement with the structure, support and validation that LLMs alone cannot deliver.
The Human-Centric Heart of Udemy
What is uniquely powerful about our platform is the combination of creating a more human-centric experience of our more than 85,000 instructors with AI. Instructors leverage our AI to develop assessments, labs, and Role Play simulations that adapt in real-time as each person is progressing.
Innovations like our Role Play technology are opening entirely new markets in sales enablement and customer support by allowing them to build custom training experiences. Our AI can create realistic and bespoke practice environments tailored to our customer’s business. This can include practicing a company’s sales methodology, rehearsing difficult client conversations, or working through unique compliance scenarios.
Building on our proven success in skills acquisition and skills mastery, we are evolving the platform to deliver even more robust and personalized experiences that amplify skills development.
This is about the human connection that delivers true learning comprehension and retention. Instructors can now offer live, individual coaching sessions to millions of learners around the world. Soon we will be launching virtual instructor-led training to allow learners to participate in structured, cohort-based experiences. At the same time, this gives instructors the ability to engage with groups of learners simultaneously. These offerings strengthen the stickiness of our platform by creating meaningful engagement for both instructors and learners. They also ensure learners receive the guidance and support that transforms knowledge into real-world capabilities.
From Selling Courses to Enabling Careers
Our subscription model creates ongoing relationships where we’re invested in learner success, not just course completion. This aligns our business model with learner outcomes. To do this effectively, we are launching career-focused subscription offerings that validate learning with two specific outcomes: Certification Journeys and Career Journeys.
Certification journeys will help people prepare for professional exams with personalized learning paths, practice tests, and exam vouchers in order to achieve universally recognized skills validation.
When learners embark on the CompTIA certification journey, which we launched in August, the average revenue per learner increased by 4x. Building on this success, we are partnering with Pearson to create a seamless certification journey for learners.
Career journeys will be structured paths for job readiness that integrate all four pillars through curated courses, hands-on projects, and assessments tied to specific roles. Many of these will be co-branded with partners, directly connecting what skills people learn to career growth and higher earnings potential.
The majority of Udemy learners come to the platform to advance their careers. Our partnership with Indeed is already proving the strength of this alignment, with learners showing materially higher consumer subscription start conversion rates compared to the Udemy average.
From our career and certification journeys to our comprehensive platform capabilities, everything we’re building is designed with one clear goal in mind: supporting the complex needs of our customers and the modern workforce.
Looking Ahead
While AI democratizes access to information, Udemy democratizes access to career transformation. We are the platform where ambition meets achievement that combines human support with structured learning that delivers validated skills mastery.
Whether it’s an individual professional seeking to advance their career or an enterprise looking to future-proof their talent, Udemy bridges that critical gap between where skills are today and where they need to be tomorrow.
We are leveraging AI to strengthen Udemy’s competitive position and expand our market opportunity. The future of work requires continuous learning, and Udemy is building the infrastructure to power that transformation. The opportunity ahead of us is immense, and I’m incredibly excited about what we’ll accomplish together.
Forward-Looking Statements
This post contains forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding Udemy’s anticipated future revenues, expenses and investments; our product roadmap and timeline; our business strategy and plans; market growth and the impact of AI technologies; and our market position and potential market opportunities. The words “believe,” “may,” “will,” “estimate,” “potential,” “continue,” “anticipate,” “intend,” “expect,” “could,” “would,” “project,” “plan,” “target,” and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements.
Forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties and are based on potentially inaccurate assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expected or implied by the forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from the results predicted and reported results should not be considered as an indication of future performance.
The potential risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ from the results predicted include, among others, those risks and uncertainties included under the caption “Risk Factors” and elsewhere in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”). All information provided in this post is as of the date hereof, and we undertake no duty to update this information unless required by law.
