Coursera, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to Coursera's first quarter 2025 earnings call. All participants are in a listen-only mode and this call is being recorded. Following the prepared remarks, we will hold a question and answer session. To ask a question, please click the raise hand button and be prepared to unmute your line when prompted. I would now like to turn the call over to Cam Carey, Head of Investor Relations. Mr. Carey, you may begin.

Hi everyone. Thank you for joining us for Coursera's Q1 2025 earnings conference call. Today, I am joined by Greg Hart, our President and Chief Executive Officer, and Ken Hahn, our Chief Financial Officer. Following their prepared remarks, we will open the call for questions. Our earnings press release was issued after market close. It is available on our investor relations website at investor.coursera.com, where this call is being webcast live and where versions of today's supplemental materials, including our new quarterly shareholder letter, can be found. During this call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. The reconciliation of non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measure can be found in today's earnings press release and supplemental materials. Please note, all growth percentages discussed refer to year-over-year change unless otherwise specified. Additionally, statements made during this call relating to future results and events are forward-looking statements based on current expectations and beliefs. Actual results and events could differ materially from those expressed or implied in these forward-looking statements due to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those discussed in our earnings press release, shareholder letter, and SEC filings. With that, I'll turn it over to Greg.

Thank you, Cam, and good afternoon, everyone. I want to begin by saying how exciting the past few months have been as I've settled into my role. Since joining Coursera in February, I have immersed myself in the business. As part of a listening and learning process, I've prioritized getting to know our team, engaging with our customers and partners, and deeply understanding our operations in order to implement new executional rigor that can begin to accelerate our progress. Fortunately, I'm starting with a strong foundation. Today, I'm pleased to share that Coursera is off to a solid start in 2025. We delivered first quarter revenue of $179 million, up 6% from a year ago. We generated over $25 million of free cash flow, up 40% year over year. and our growth expectations for the full year have improved. We now expect to deliver $725 million of revenue at the midpoint of our range as we lay the groundwork for our next chapter of growth. In addition to our financial progress, we welcome more than 7 million learners this quarter, marking a Q1 record and underscoring the global demand for job-relevant skills and trusted credentials. I'm particularly excited about our innovation efforts, which are focused on building durable capabilities that can reimagine the learning experience and deliver more value for our customers. Over the past two months, I've learned a great deal and want to provide some initial observations. First, it is clear that Coursera attracts a dedicated and talented workforce. The company has a strong culture rooted in innovation and motivated by our mission. Our team cares deeply about the millions of learners our platform serves and is focused on expanding the impact we create and the outcomes we can unlock by transforming access to education and career opportunities. I am thrilled to be working alongside them. Second, the pace of change is accelerating around the world, expanding our market opportunities while creating new avenues for growth. In January, the World Economic Forum estimated that 59% of the world's workforce will require some form of upskilling or reskilling training by 2030. As the need to develop new skills progresses at an unprecedented rate, individuals require access to education that can help them advance their careers and remain competitive in a global labor market. Businesses across every sector need to develop a more agile workforce that can drive innovation and transform their operations. And higher education must adapt to mounting pressures. Students desire a more compelling value proposition. And employers demand graduates with job-relevant skills. And demographic and enrollment trends will require universities to expand their revenue streams. Meeting this moment will require a leader with the scale, technology, and ecosystem to reinvent how education is delivered. Coursera is positioned to do just that. We operate on solid footing with a strong, continuously improving set of foundational assets and the capacity to drive durable, long-term growth. Our team has made strong progress delivering new products, capabilities, and experiences across our platform, but I believe we can move at a faster pace. Working with the leadership team, I have started to implement thoughtful changes to our operating model, focused on driving more innovation and engagement throughout our learner experience, more rapid product development cycles, and a data-driven approach to continuous improvement in all aspects of our business. At the highest level, our mission is to serve learners by providing trusted education that unlocks career mobility. As part of this effort, we have simplified our business model and segment reporting, integrating the consumer and degree segments as both support consumer learners around the world. The degrees market opportunity will continue to be an important part of our long-term strategy, but our new model is designed to accomplish three things. Simplify our structure, reflect the learner journey at the center of our decision-making, and focus the investments we are making in a unified end-to-end platform experience that spans all product categories. Whether it's a standalone course, a professional certificate, or a college degree, our job is to deliver the right content at the right time to support each learner's personal goals. By building an integrated learner journey, we ensure that our investments in platform capabilities, marketing, and discovery, and the next breakthrough learning experience provide a consistent experience for the broad audiences that we serve. from helping our consumer learners navigate their careers to supporting our enterprise customers looking for the best way to upskill their workforces to adapt to a rapidly changing business environment. As we lay the groundwork for our next phase of innovation and growth, we continue to execute on our 2025 plan with strong progress in expanding our ecosystem. Content is the engine of our business and the foundation of that ecosystem. Our catalog now includes nearly 10,000 courses, growing by 37% over the past year. We are building a faster, more agile content model that preserves the value of our credible, high quality brands and meets the rapid pace of skills development for real-time learner and business needs. A key offering is our generative AI content and credentials. Our content creators, many of which are the world's leading AI companies, have launched nearly 700 AI courses as they look to meet the growing demand for these skills. So far this year, we are seeing 12 enrollments per minute in AI content, up from one per minute in 2023 and eight per minute in 2024. We also continue to expand our catalog of entry-level professional certificates. This year, we have launched five new certificates from industry partners, including Adobe, deeplearning.ai, IBM, John Hopkins Medicine, and Microsoft, expanding our total catalog to 90 certificates. These certificates provide our learners with a pathway to entry-level jobs in fields such as software development, cybersecurity, data science, business, and healthcare, while students can increasingly earn college credit for these certificates. More than 30 of our certificates in this catalog have received one or more credit recommendations from ACE in the US, ECTS in Europe, and NSQF in India, which are part of our efforts to create more distinct value for learners and customers by enabling pathways to college degrees. Later this month, we will publish our 2025 micro-credentials impact report, drawing insights from more than 2,000 students and employers. A preview of several key findings showcases why we continue to enhance this catalog. 85% of employers are more likely to hire a candidate who has a micro-credential compared to one without. And 94% of students want micro-credentials to count towards their degree, which is up from 55% in 2023. As students are increasingly concerned about whether a traditional degree will equip them with the skills they need to land a job in a competitive labor market, micro-credentials have emerged as a solution that prepares graduates for the modern workplace, augments the expertise of traditional university courses, and gives employers assurance that entry-level hires possess the job-relevant skills needed by their workforce. The breadth and quality of our content engine enables us to serve both upskilling and reskilling value propositions. As a result, our catalog attracts learners from around the world, making Coursera one of the largest and most globally distributed learning platforms. We have attracted over 175 million learners with the US, India, Mexico, and Brazil among our largest markets. This global reach not only drives scale, but creates powerful opportunities for localization, enabling us to tailor content, language, and experiences to meet the needs of learners and labor markets in different regions. Additionally, many working adults access learning in institutional settings. We now serve 1,651 paid enterprise customers spanning businesses, governments, and campuses. Our customer partners, Our customers partner with Coursera not only for content, but a robust set of platform capabilities that can meet the unique needs of each vertical with a shared foundation, driving skills transformation for employees, enabling government workforce development at scale, and powering academic innovation. Our growing base of learners and enterprise customers continues to attract leading content creators from world-class universities to industry leaders. These creators are trusted by learners for their academic rigor, industry expertise, and real world relevance. As demand for career aligned education grows, we believe top universities and industry partners will increasingly view Coursera as a strategic platform to extend their reach and impact. Google, one of our strongest partnerships, has created several of the most popular certificates on Coursera. Last year, they launched AI Essentials, a course designed to help learners across roles and industries gain valuable AI skills and hands-on experience with AI tools to boost productivity. It was the most popular course on Coursera in 2024, with over 1 million enrollments to date. And in February, Google added a course on agile essentials to our catalog, teaching software development methodologies to professionals across industries and teams. Additionally, our relationship with Microsoft, which began in April 2021, continues to deepen. Over the past three years, we have partnered to launch more than 35 professional certificates and specializations that encompass over 170 courses covering topics ranging from Azure Cloud to Excel, and more recently, AI. Earlier this month, we announced more than 1 million learners have enrolled in Microsoft content with learners coming from more than 195 countries. We are proud of how our shared commitment with these partners can broaden access to job relevant skills and technology education. And we look forward to expanding our efforts so that learners everywhere can succeed in an evolving labor market. I believe our next chapter of growth will be defined by innovation, and I am committed to accelerating the role our platform will play in shaping the future of learning. Coursera's ecosystem is powered by our platform, which benefits from rapidly expanding global reach to scaled access to learning, data-driven insights to inform our content strategy and skill recommendations, and advanced AI and technology tools to enhance discovery, deliver a more personalized and interactive learning experience, and empower instructors to create and augment courses that are engaging and impactful for learners. The team has made strong recent progress building new products and capabilities across our platform. I would like to highlight three examples that demonstrate how we're focused on driving improvements in engagement, retention, and conversion by delivering more valuable experiences for our learners. First, technology continues to rapidly reduce language barriers, opening access to education and career opportunities. As you know, Coursera started rolling out AI-powered text translations in 2023, which have enabled nearly 3 million learners to access more than 5,000 courses across 26 languages. Last week, we announced the next phase of our translation initiative with the launch of more than 100 AI-dubbed courses in Spanish, French, German, and Brazilian Portuguese. Now learners can not only read, but hear courses in their native language with natural voice, tone, and lip sync, which offers a remarkably better experience than conventional dubbing. In the initial text-based phase, learners completed translated courses at higher rates and nearly 25% faster compared to those offered only in the original language. With the advancements in audio, we're excited about the possibility of driving stronger engagement and better outcomes. Over the course of Q2 and the rest of this year, we will expand the breadth of courses and range of languages available with AI dubbing as we continue our efforts to bring the world's best education to learners everywhere. Next is Coursera Coach, which started as a learning assistant but is rapidly expanding in breadth and depth. Coach has become an increasingly core presence across our platform with expanding features in career guidance and discovery, instructional design, and customer support. In Q4, we piloted Coach Dialogues, which allow instructors to incorporate personalized, interactive learning experiences throughout their courses, acting as an extension of their teaching to help learners think more deeply about course material and concepts. The early signals are promising, showing a significant impact in learner engagement for courses with dialogues. I'm pleased to share that dialogues are generally available as of the first week of April, and we'll be closely monitoring performance as we seek to drive broad adoption of this new capability across our catalog. Finally, Coursera's prominence as a global destination for career-motivated learning attracts a broad range of learners. From our survey data, we know that the majority of learners looking to start or switch their careers do not know what they need to learn or where to begin. Historically, our search and discovery experience has emphasized the breadth of our offerings. We recognized opportunities to better understand our learners' goals, guide them on what roles can be learned fully online, and how high-quality education and credentials can provide a pathway to a more satisfying career. Starting in Q4, we began testing an improved career-based discovery experience that maps our broad selection of credentials to specific job roles and skills. The new experience, which continues to be rolled out globally, includes improved onboarding, allowing us to better understand learner goals and provide more personalized recommendations, 60 role description pages, which provide credential recommendations across different levels of career progression and expertise, and localized salary and job data for approximately 40 countries. The preliminary results are showing positive impacts in our paid learner conversion. We expect to rapidly expand these early features with a wider selection of roles, a better understanding of learner goals to personalize guidance and recommendations, and a clear learning and career progression from beginner courses to industry certificates and college degrees. This is an experience that Coursera is uniquely capable of creating. As I reflect on my first months as CEO, I'm excited about the opportunities ahead and Coursera's role in shaping the future of education. The foundational elements are all in place. Solid financial performance with a strong balance sheet. An expanding ecosystem at the forefront of learning with distinct assets and global scale. And a growing market opportunity to serve both individuals and institutions with an integrated platform. Our efforts to unlock Coursera's next chapter of innovation and growth are well underway. In the coming quarters, our priorities will be centered around three key areas. First and foremost, product innovation is key to our strategy. We are committed to expanding access to the world's best education and career opportunities through focused improvements in our learner experience. This means accelerating product development cycles, leveraging advanced AI and data-driven insights, and continuously enhancing our platform's capabilities. Second, we will continue to accelerate our content engine. By rapidly growing our catalog of high-quality, job-relevant courses with more leading content creators, we can meet the fast-changing skill requirements of learners looking to transform their careers and companies needing to transform their businesses through their most important asset, their people. Third, we will enhance our go-to-market capabilities. We aim to guide individual learners more effectively through improved discovery, merchandising, and a clear value proposition. Career-based discovery is just the start. This, combined with optimizing our enterprise channels, enables us to reach and serve our customers efficiently and effectively. While it's still early days, I'm confident in the clear direction we are taking, grounded in strong fundamentals, an important mission, and a highly motivated team. Now, I'll hand it over to Ken to walk us through the financial performance and outlook in more detail. Ken, please go ahead.