Coursera announced job cuts on July 6, eight weeks after its merger with Udemy closed. The company didn’t say how many people were affected. The only number it gave was a cost, $8 million to $11 million.
After digging around California’s website, I found that 59 people were laid off: 31 from Coursera’s Mountain View headquarters, and 28 from Udemy’s office in San Francisco. California only requires these notices for jobs in the state, so that isn’t the whole number.
Based on what the two companies have paid per employee in past layoff rounds, Class Central estimates about 150 people lost their jobs.
This is the fifth round of layoffs across the two companies since 2022.
Coursera and Udemy agreed to merge in December 2025, after three earlier attempts over two years. The deal closed on May 11, and Udemy is now a wholly owned subsidiary. Coursera said at the time that the combination was “expected to generate meaningful operating efficiencies.”
On Tuesday it announced a $100 million investment in LearnVector, a new AI learning company founded by Andrew Ng, who co-founded Coursera and chairs its board.
Five Rounds in Four Years
| Round | What the company said | Cost | People laid off | In California |
| Coursera, Nov 2022 | no number | $10.1M | ~185 (estimate) | 77 |
| Udemy, Feb 2023 | 10% of staff | $8.9M | ~170 (estimate) | 74 |
| Udemy, Sep 2024 | 280 people | $15.5M | 280 | none filed |
| Coursera, Oct 2024 | 10%, later revised to 9% | $6.8M | ~120 (estimate) | 61 |
| Coursera and Udemy, Jul 2026 | no number | $8M to $11M | ~150 (estimate) | 59 |
Coursera also restructured its Enterprise sales force in January 2024 at a cost of $2.1 million. It was never announced, and appears only in routine SEC filings.
California requires companies to file a public notice before a large layoff, and that’s where the last column comes from. Those notices only cover jobs in the state.
The estimates come from what each round cost. Where the company gave both a cost and a size, it works out to around $55,000 a person. Coursera has come in at or below the bottom of its own cost estimates every time before, so I went with the lower end.
How Big Are These Companies?
| 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | |
| Coursera | 1,138 | 1,401 | 1,295 | 1,260 | 1,307 |
| Udemy | 1,238 | 1,678 | 1,443 | 1,246 | 1,380 |
| Combined | 2,376 | 3,079 | 2,738 | 2,506 | 2,687 |
Coursera and Udemy ended last year with 2,687 people between them, so 150 works out to around 6%.
The combined headcount peaked at 3,079 in 2022. Coursera has about as many people now as it did at the end of 2023, before its last round of layoffs, and both companies grew in 2025.
The Rest of the Plan
Coursera’s July filing describes the layoffs as one piece of a bigger plan, and says the company is also working on other changes that “may result in additional costs and benefits beyond those described herein.”
The scale of those is in a presentation Coursera gave investors in June. The company usually talks about saving $115 million a year. What it actually plans to cut is $150 million or more. The gap is $35 million of profit it expects to lose along the way, which it subtracts before quoting the figure.
Coursera groups the cuts into two areas: sales and services, and duplicate corporate jobs and IT systems. It has never said how much of that is people and how much is software.
On Wednesday it said it now expects to be saving at least $85 million a year by the end of 2026, up from the $80 million it forecast in June, and that it should reach the full $115 million before the end of 2027, ahead of schedule.
So the July layoffs were a start. Coursera hasn’t said how many more jobs are in the rest.
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