The company's long-term partner Benesse Holdings has committed to investing $50 million in the learning platform.
Online learning and teaching platform Udemy has secured $50 million (approximately R790 million) investment from the organisation’s long-time partner and Japanese investment company Benesse Holdings, which focuses on correspondence education and publishing. Its current investment injection will take Udemy’s valuation beyond $2 billion (approximately R31 billion).
Since confirming the investment injection, Udemy has announced plans to hire 100 people at its newly expanded Dublin base over the next year. The company has opened a new office on Windmill Lane, representing a continued investment in its EMEA headquarters and allowing it to double the size of its current Dublin workforce.
Udemy is headquartered in San Francisco and has offices in Denver, Brazil, India, Ireland and Turkey. It offers online courses to students in more than 190 countries and was set up in 2010. It currently caters to millions of students through 57,000 instructors, teaching more than 150,000 online courses in many topics, from programming to leadership.
Within a few months of its launch, Udemy had 1,000 instructors had signed up on the platform, creating more than 2,000 courses and about 10,000 users already registered to take their online courses.
The company’s model has consistently made courses available to people at lower prices than some of its counterpart.
