This afternoon, Coursera reports its first quarterly earnings since the Udemy deal closed. Yesterday, it announced a $100 million investment in LearnVector, a new AI learning company founded by Andrew Ng. LearnVector’s domain was registered exactly one month ago and somehow it’s worth $300M? It’s a single page website with five open roles in Mountain View, and a promise of a first product in early 2027. Its founder is the co-founder of Coursera and the chairman of its board. If my reading of t

In 2021, 10 years after it burst on the scene, the MOOC ecosystem has reached 220M learners and 19.4K courses.

Class Central, yet again, came across a 2U employee’s layoff post on LinkedIn. This is its sixth layoff (that we know of) since 2U acquired edX in 2021. The first one happened in 2022 for profitability’s sake. Since then, the company filed for bankruptcy (mostly due to the debt it took to acquire edX for $800M), took down its bootcamps, exited many university partnerships, and even got delisted from the stock market. The previous layoffs were framed as strategy shifts, realigning operations, o

This year, Duolingo announced a major strategic shift: from monetization to user growth, with a target of 100 million daily active users by the end of 2028. To get there, it needs to grow about 25% year over year, every quarter. In Q2 2026, daily users grew 23%, to 58.7 million, the first time growth has sped up in two years. Duolingo also disclosed a roughly $10 million bonus that pays out if Q4 growth hits 25% or more. Paid subscribers grew by about 200,000 in the quarter, the fewest since 2