Coursera, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to Coursera's first quarter 2026 earnings call. All participants are in a listen-only mode and this call is being recorded. Following the prepared remarks, we'll 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, Vice President of Investor Relations. Mr Carey, you may begin.

Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us for Coursera's Q1 2026 earnings conference call. Today, I'm joined by Greg Hart, our President and Chief Executive Officer, and Mike Foley, 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 materials, including our quarterly shareholder letter, have been published. During this call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A 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 that all growth percentages discussed refer to year-over-year change unless otherwise specified. All 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. Please refer to today's earnings press release for more details on our forward-looking statements. With that, I'll turn it over to Greg.

Thank you, Cam, and good afternoon, everyone. We appreciate you joining us. Coursera delivered a strong start to the year, reflecting continued execution across our core growth priorities. In Q1, we generated revenue of $196 million, up 9% year over year, driven by double-digit growth in our consumer segment for the fourth consecutive quarter. we added 7.6 million new registered learners, a first quarter record, bringing our cumulative learner base to more than 200 million. We delivered this growth while expanding our non-GAAP gross margin to 57%, the highest level in three years, reflecting structural improvements we continue to make in our business model, including stronger unit economics that demonstrate the value our platform delivers. Given our solid execution in the first quarter, we are reaffirming our full year 2026 outlook, which Mike will discuss in more detail. Our recent performance reflects both the strength of our platform and a broader shift in the labor market as global demand continues to validate the urgency around skills development. Earlier this year, we published the fifth edition of our Job Skills Report, drawing on insights from nearly 6 million enterprise learners across 7,000 organizations. Three trends stood out. First, AI is not replacing foundational skills. It is amplifying them. learners are increasingly layering AI capabilities on top of core technical expertise, recognizing that AI is most powerful when built on domain knowledge. Second, human skills are becoming more important, not less. Enrollments in critical thinking courses grew 120% year over year. Learners understand that as more work is automated, the ability to evaluate and guide AI output is becoming critical. Third, skills verification is becoming essential as learners and employers alike seek more trusted signals of skills mastery. Enrollments in professional certificates grew by an average of 91% across the career areas we analyzed, reflecting the rising market demand for bite-sized, industry-recognized credentials that provide verifiable proof of skills proficiency. We see similar trends in external data. Anthropics Economic Index from March found that 49% of job types can now use AI for at least a quarter of their tasks. AI is diffusing through the economy roughly 10 times faster than any 20th century technology. Yet the gap between AI's potential and actual deployment remains significant. Closing that gap will require a more advanced infrastructure for skills. We believe this creates an expanding market opportunity as the window to build competitive skills continues to narrow. Today, Coursera is uniquely positioned at the intersection of these trends, and our planned combination with Udemy will further strengthen our ability to meet this moment with greater scale, data, and product velocity. Now let's turn to our first quarter progress, starting with the continued expansion of our global ecosystem. Coursera's platform is built on a foundation of branded credentials, verified assessments, and curated career pathways, taught by more than 375 leading universities and industry partners. In an environment where content is abundant and increasingly commoditized, learners and organizations are not seeking more information. They are looking for trusted pathways that directly translate skills into real-world capability. Our value lies in combining trusted content with data-driven insights and verified outcomes, enabling learners and organizations not only to build skills, but to demonstrate and validate them. That value strengthens as we scale. This quarter, we reached a meaningful milestone, 205 million cumulative registered learners. At this scale, the value of our ecosystem extends beyond distribution. It creates a compounding data advantage, an advantage that will be further strengthened by our planned combination with Udemy, particularly by expanding our lens into the evolving workforce through Udemy's 17,000 enterprise customers. Together, we expect to have a broader, more real-time view into how skills are learned, how they evolve, and how organizations develop talent. These insights can help fuel a faster, more agile content engine and inform the experiences we build. Generative AI remains the clearest example of why this matters. Our platform now offers more than 1300 AI courses, nearly double from a year ago. Engagement has continued to accelerate, with more than 20 enrollments per minute in Q1, up from 15 per minute last year and 8 per minute in 2024. Learners and organizations are moving beyond basic familiarity with AI toward continuous demonstrated capability, including the ability to apply skills in real workflows, solve practical problems for specific roles, and contribute more effectively in increasingly AI-enabled environments. Our content creators, including many of the companies building these technologies, play a critical role in meeting this demand and ensuring that emerging skills developed on Coursera remain closely aligned with labor market needs. In February, Google launched its first AI professional certificate on Coursera, expanding a generative AI portfolio that has already attracted more than 3 million enrollments. This program is designed to build practical, job-ready AI skills and help learners apply them in day-to-day workflows. As part of the launch, Google is offering learners three months of no-cost access to Google AI Pro, enabling hands-on experience with its most advanced models and tools. We also expanded our partnership with Microsoft. Earlier this month, we launched 11 new professional certificates with structured learning pathways across AI, data, and software development, from deploying AI agents and modern data architectures to building customer-facing AI applications. These programs are designed to capture where both technology and job demand are headed. While expanding Microsoft's professional certificate portfolio on Coursera by more than 50%, building on a catalog with more than 1.3 million enrollments. Technology companies increasingly view Coursera not just as a distribution channel, but as a strategic platform to help close the global skills gap and support workforce transformation at scale. In addition to our reach, Coursera adds rigor, trust, and validation to industry content, grounded in the pedagogical best practices of our university partners. Our credit recommendation initiative is one example. Today, many of our professional certificates are eligible for academic credit, including more than 50 with ACE recommendations in the US and over 40 with ECTS recognition in Europe. In March, we tripled the number of certificates aligned to India's NSQF framework to 30, including top programs from Google, IBM, and Microsoft. We are not only expanding access to high quality credentials, we are adding structure, assessment, and validation in ways that help bridge workforce skills and higher education. For learners, this creates more flexible and affordable pathways to employment and degrees. For institutions, it provides a trusted way to integrate industry-aligned content into their curriculum while maintaining academic rigor. We continue to see this taking shape at a system level. Since 2022, Coursera has partnered with Kazakhstan's Ministry of Science and Higher Education to support a nationwide effort to integrate job-relevant, four-credit learning into higher education. To date, this collaboration has reached more than 235,000 students across 100 universities, with more than half a million certificates earned. In Q1, we renewed this partnership to expand Skills First for credit learning and further modernize the country's higher education system through stronger alignment with evolving workforce needs. Stepping back, a consistent theme emerges. In a Skills First economy, every participant, from learners and businesses to governments and academic institutions, requires a better system of record for skills. We believe Coursera is well positioned to become that system of record at global scale, enabling individuals to discover, build, and verify new skills, helping organizations benchmark and develop new workforce capabilities, and equipping instructors with tools to deliver more personalized, adaptive learning experiences. Now, turning to our product updates. As we scale our ecosystem, we are focused on translating these advantages into differentiated product experiences. The trends I outlined are directly shaping how we build and innovate. Learners are not simply consuming content. They are integrating AI into broader skill sets, combining technical expertise with critical thinking and real-world application. At the same time, AI is diffusing rapidly while adoption within organizations remains uneven and often lags what the technology enables. Closing the gap between AI capability and application requires more than content consumption. It requires more adaptive, contextual experiences, built on an enterprise-grade AI-native platform, designed to diagnose skills gaps, deliver personalized guidance, and accelerate workforce readiness at scale. This is our focus in the year ahead. I'll highlight three examples. First, learning in the flow of work. As AI becomes embedded in everyday tools, learning must evolve alongside it. We believe workforce transformation will depend on integrating skills development directly into how work gets done. This quarter, we took another important step in that direction with the launch of the first learning agent built for Microsoft 365 Copilot. This agentic solution delivers Coursera's learning directly into the context of day-to-day work, enabling real-time application of knowledge within the tools employees use every day. As users build models, prepare pitches, or design AI-powered workflows, the agent surfaces relevant guidance in real time, helping to accelerate time to proficiency through immediate application and reinforcement. This integration just launched at the end of March. Similar to our early ChatGPT integration, we are focused on rapid iteration and collaboration while positioning Coursera at the forefront of AI-native skills delivery, no matter where the learning journey begins. Second, deeper enterprise integrations. As organizations struggle to align learning investments with business priorities, we are integrating more deeply with the systems used to manage talent, performance, and skills. For example, earlier this quarter, we launched the next phase of our Workday Learning and Skills Cloud integration, enabling organizations to map learning to in-demand skills, personalized recommendations, and validate skill progression within employee profiles. By the end of Q1, we onboarded 10 initial customers and expect to expand this in the coming months. We will continue investing in AI-native integrations that allow Coursera's training to be surfaced and measured more seamlessly across enterprise workflows. This is an area of strength at Udemy, where the team has developed robust enterprise integrations we plan to build upon. Together, these efforts move us toward a more connected skills infrastructure, one that positions learning as a core element of business strategy by aligning learning to business priorities, helping organizations understand and address skill gaps, and measuring the impact of workforce skilling investments. Our final update reflects ongoing efforts to enhance discovery and learning on Coursera, making the experience more interactive, personalized, and contextual. In April, we launched the next iteration of our interactive role-play experience. This launch builds on our initial text-based interface by enabling real-time voice-to-voice simulations so that learners can practice course concepts in real-life scenarios using a more natural format. It also provides immediate, actionable feedback from the AI persona. This illustrates how AI-powered experiences can scale immersive learning to develop and assess a broader range of non-technical skills. from leadership and collaboration to sales and negotiation. The rollout remains early, but initial consumer experiments show a meaningful increase in engagement for learners selecting the voice-enabled experience. Role play, along with recent experiments and conversational discovery, AI-powered search and microlearning builds on the early foundation we established with AI-powered features for tutoring, authoring, and translation. As we look ahead, we intend to accelerate our transition from AI-enabled features to fully AI-native experiences, where learning is not only personalized, but increasingly proactive, contextual, and embedded directly into how individuals and organizations operate. Taken together, these efforts reflect the start of a more dynamic AI-native platform that helps individuals develop skills in the flow of work while enabling organizations to better assess and deploy talent at scale. As we look ahead, our priorities are clear. We are executing a strategy focused on three areas. First, accelerating AI-native product innovation. Second, building a more comprehensive skills development solution, spanning just-in-time skills and the flow of work to trusted, verified credentials. And third, improving how we reach, serve, and empower our growing community of learners, institutions, and content creators. Our planned combination with Udemy will further accelerate this strategy as we evolve beyond a content catalog into a more dynamic system for skills delivery, one that supports the full talent lifecycle from individual career growth to enterprise-wide workforce transformation at scale. We are grateful for the continued support of our shareholders and look forward to executing on the significant value creation opportunity ahead. I'll now turn it over to Mike to discuss our financial performance in more detail. Mike, please go ahead.

Thank you, Greg, and good afternoon, everyone. Coursera entered the year in a position of financial strength, and our first quarter results reflect continued execution against our 2026 priorities, including strong consumer momentum and improving platform economics, as Greg outlined. In Q1, we generated total revenue of $196 million, up 9% year over year. Growth was driven by sustained momentum in our Coursera Plus consumer subscription. In enterprise, the environment remains mixed, particularly within Coursera for Business, where we are focused on delivering steady improvements in our go-to-market execution and product offerings. For the remainder of this call, I will discuss our non-GAAP financial measures, unless otherwise stated. Gross profit was $111 million, up 11% year over year. This represented a gross margin of 57%, marking the highest gross margin in three years, despite the faster growth in our consumer segment relative to our structurally higher margin enterprise segment. The 80 basis points of year over year expansion reflects continued improvements in our consumer and enterprise segment margin rates, driven by two initiatives. First, early benefits from the platform fee introduced at the start of the year, which is beginning to impact consumer margin and will gradually ramp over time as new sales are recognized. Second, higher engagement with Coursera-produced content, which carries more favorable economics, given the role our technology and authoring capabilities play. These improvements were partially offset by other cost of revenue, as well as the faster growth and greater revenue mix from consumer. Overall, we're making strong progress on delivering structural gross margin expansion with benefits that should compound once our efforts to improve our enterprise segment trajectory begin to materialize. Total operating expense was $103 million, or 53% of revenue, consistent with our plan to invest early in the year to expand our product, data, and go-to-market capabilities. As we made those investments, we remained disciplined, focusing resources on areas that improve product velocity, strengthen go-to-market execution and support long-term profitable growth. Net income was $12 million or 6.3% of revenue and adjusted EBITDA was nearly $14 million or 6.9% of revenue. Our 2026 plan builds on last year's momentum while balancing growth investments with consistent annual margin expansion. Q1 performance was in line with our expectations and keeps our pacing well on track to achieve our full year adjusted EBITDA margin target of approximately 9%. As a reminder, this year's margin expansion target reflects Coursera's standalone operations. It does not include Udemy's higher margin profile or the meaningful operating efficiencies we are prepared to achieve with our combined scale. Turning to cash performance and the balance sheet. In Q1, we generated $3 million of free cash flow. This included approximately $6 million in purchases of content assets, treated similarly to other forms of capital expenditures, effectively reducing our reported free cash flow. Additionally, we recognized more than $11 million of cash payments related to one-time M&A transaction costs, previewed last quarter and footnoted in today's financials. Excluding these one-time M&A costs, free cash flow would have been approximately $14 million. This is consistent with our expectation for free cash flow to largely track with adjusted EBITDA over time and better reflects the underlying earnings and cash generation potential of the business. As of March 31st, we had approximately $790 million of unrestricted cash and cash equivalents on the balance sheet and no debt. This strong financial position provides us with the flexibility to invest in growth, remain agile, and explore opportunities to create greater returns for our shareholders. As discussed previously, this includes the anticipated announcement of a sizable share repurchase program in short order following the close of the proposed transaction with Udemy and receipt of authorization by the newly formed Board of Directors following close. This is one of several actions, including our efforts to manage dilution, that underscore the value we place on shareholder equity. It also reflects our confidence in the execution of our strategy, the scale of the global scaling opportunity, and the long-term value creation we see for our business and its shareholders. Now, let's discuss the results of our operating segments. In Q1, consumer segment revenue was $130 million, up 10% from a year ago. As Greg highlighted, this was our fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth driven by two primary factors. First, we welcomed 7.6 million new registered learners, a record for the first quarter. This reflects continued expansion of our global reach, diversified marketing channels, and ongoing experimentation to improve learner acquisition and conversion. Second, we continue to see strong adoption of Coursera+, which remains a key driver of both growth and revenue visibility. We introduced Coursera Plus in 2021 to better align with a world where skills development is becoming more continuous, career-focused, and essential to long-term employability. We continue to enhance its value through expanded content offerings, improved product experiences, and localized pricing, promotion, and payment capabilities. In early Q1, we saw strong uptake of our annual Coursera Plus promotion. supporting higher lifetime value and improved retention, even as it creates a modest timing effect on near-term revenue recognition. Consumer segment gross profit was $82 million, up 13% from a year ago. Segment gross margin was 63%, an increase of 160 basis points year over year, reflecting an improvement of approximately 250 basis points in our core consumer subscription and courses product category, offset by the lower contribution from our high margin degrees. As I noted earlier, we started to see the early benefit of the platform fee introduced at the start of the year, consistent with our expectations for a gradual ramp that will first impact new consumer purchases given the faster velocity of the revenue cycle. We also saw increased learner engagement with content produced under more favorable revenue share arrangements. Overall, our performance reflected continued execution of our consumer strategy. As we move through 2026, we expect to build on this progress by experimenting with opportunities to optimize our marketing funnel and deepening engagement with new product experiences. Following the close of the Udemy transaction, we intend to continue operating each company's consumer platform independently through at least the end of the year. Over time, we believe the proposed combination can further strengthen the value of our subscription offerings, broadening the roles and domains we serve, increasing engagement with real-time skilling needs, and serving the end-to-end career lifecycle with a unified global platform. Now, turning to our enterprise segment. Enterprise revenue was $66 million, up 7% year over year. Performance in the quarter reflected a mixed demand environment with variability across customer segments, regions, and use cases. Consistent with recent trends, growth was driven by our campus vertical, as well as a meaningful contribution from a large government expansion we highlighted last quarter. The total number of paid enterprise customers increased by 5% year over year, and our net retention rate was 90%. While retention improved in campus and government, performance in Coursera for Business, our largest enterprise offering, remains below our long-term expectations. With operational changes underway and the future capabilities of a combined solution with Udemy, we expect to drive more consistent retention and expansion over time. Segment gross profit was $47 million, up 9% from the prior year period. Segment gross margin was 71%, up 80 basis points year over year, consistent with the engagement trends and structural improvements benefiting our consumer segment. As organizations prioritize skills transformation, they're increasingly focused on solutions that deliver measurable outcomes and a clear return on investment. In this environment, we remain focused on improving execution through refinements to our go-to-market approach, while improving the customer experience with product investments Greg mentioned. This includes driving more consistent performance in Coursera for Business, our largest opportunity for improvement. We expect progress to be gradual as these changes take hold given the longer and more variable enterprise sales cycle. That said, we're also preparing for the combination with Udemy, which we believe will significantly strengthen our enterprise offering by expanding our skills development solutions, accelerating a shared product roadmap, and enhancing our combined ability to reach and serve organizations at scale. Finally, turning to our outlook. For the second quarter, we expect revenue to be in the range of $196 to $200 million, representing growth of 5% to 7% year-over-year. This outlook reflects continued strength in consumer, offset by the slower trajectory in enterprise consistent with the full-year segment-level expectations outlined last quarter. We expect adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $12 to $16 million as we balance continued operating discipline while investing in our most productive growth opportunities early in the year. Lastly, absent the combination with Udemy and the corresponding transaction and integration-related cash impacts, we would expect free cash flow to largely track at or above adjusted EBITDA. For Q2, we expect free cash flow to be impacted by approximately $13 million of transaction-related cash payments. This estimate only reflects transaction fees and pre-closed planning costs. It does not include additional contingent expenses expected to be incurred upon closing or during integration. For full year 2026, we are reaffirming our prior guidance. We expect to deliver revenue in the range of $805 to $815 million, representing growth of approximately 6% to 8% from the prior year. For adjusted EBITDA, we're pacing confidently to our annual adjusted EBITDA margin target of approximately 9%, expecting to deliver in the range of $70 to $76 million as we work within our full year framework. As a reminder, today's guidance reflects Coursera's expectations on a standalone basis and does not include any impact from the proposed Udemy transaction. As we look ahead to the combination, we remain highly confident in our ability to realize approximately $115 million of annual run rate cost synergies within 24 months of closing, primarily driven by go-to-market optimization and G&A efficiencies. Over the last several months, we have made strong progress on integration planning, positioning us to move quickly. We now expect to realize a significant majority of these synergies within the first year following close. As with any integration of this scale, particularly as we bring together our go-to-market teams, we're being deliberate in managing potential revenue dis-synergies. These dynamics are already factored into our synergy expectations. Over time, we see opportunities to drive revenue synergies, particularly through cross-selling a broader set of skilling solutions. However, we're intentionally not quantifying these opportunities until we have greater visibility into customer feedback and enablement opportunities. In advance of our first quarterly earnings call following the close, we look forward to hosting a call to provide more detailed expectations on our integration plans, synergy realization timing, capital allocation priorities, and a consolidated outlook for the future combined company. In the meantime, as we approach the close of the Udemy transaction, which remains subject to regulatory approval, we are focused on three priorities. Executing the integration thoughtfully while prioritizing continuity for learners, customers, and partners. Positioning the combined company to accelerate product innovation and deliver durable product-led growth. And delivering on the significant value creation opportunity we see ahead for our business and its shareholders. With that, let's open up the call for questions.

As a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, please click on the raise hand button at the bottom of your screen. Once prompted, please unmute your line and ask a question. We'll now pause a moment to assemble the queue. We'll take our first question from Brian Smiley with JP Morgan. Please go ahead.

Great. Great. Thanks for taking the questions. I guess, Greg, to start, you talked about building a more comprehensive and adapted skills delivery system that combines AI with verification and data. Can you just talk a bit more about your efforts to make the product more actionable, improving discovery and engagement? And conversely, how do you think about balancing your current consumer strength with a greater focus on the enterprise tech stack integrations as you close a transaction with Udemy? Thank you.

Yeah, thanks, Brian. So one of the things that you're already seeing a little bit of on the platform with some of the things that we've rolled out over the last quarter or so are a more AI-centric sort of front door, if you will. So an AI-enabled search experience that is a little bit more conversational and helps guide users to content. And then obviously they can go as deep as they want in that conversation. to help make sure that they're finding the right content for themselves. But what we really want to do over time and what there's a lot of energy and attention on, and I touched on a few of those things in my scripted remarks, is have the experience be one that is more interactive and engaging. So we talked about role play and voice-enabled role play. which has seen really positive response from users. It's a more natural way, obviously, to engage in role play than just a text-based back and forth. We want to continue to do that and expand as well into dialogue and expand our dialogue efforts. To remind you, dialogue is effectively a back and forth conversation that an instructor can create leveraging AI so that it can be integrated as an item within a course that they've created. And it'll be true to whatever their rubric is because they structure it to achieve their specific goals. So continuing to do more and more of that while recognizing also that over time, what we really want to do is have that learning experience become much more deeply personalized to each learner. And so instead of every course looking the same for every user over time, we want that to be, you know, really starting at a place that's appropriate for one user versus another, based on their background, their experience, and their skills. To do that well, you need to, in a lightweight way, assess learning. where they are. And so that's the division of where we want to go to. And what you'll see reflected, that's a big part of all of the planning we're doing for the combined platform with Udemy. On the enterprise side of things, Obviously, with enterprise, you want to handle any enterprise platform consolidation in a very thoughtful way. And so we want to make sure that each of our existing platforms, once we close, continue to provide value to all of our existing enterprise customers. But we also think there's an opportunity to create a platform that is far better than either of them are individually. The Udemy platform on the enterprise side, frankly, is ahead of our Coursera platform, and obviously they have a larger enterprise business. One of the things that we are very excited about jointly is the Altus announcement that they made a few months ago. That is exactly where we believe enterprises want the learning experience to go, which is integrated directly into the flow of work. they will be piloting Altus over this coming quarter with a number of different enterprise partners. And that's going to be a core part of our vision for the future enterprise platform.

Great. Thank you.

We'll take our next question from Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Thank you so much for taking the question. I wanted to double click on some of the comments during the prepared remarks and just frame up what you see as some of the key strategic investments you're making around AI when you think about the content dynamic around the platform, as well as some of the user experiences. across a multi-year view and how you're thinking about that content and those experiences leading to higher levels of retention and more economic value being delivered by users on the platform over the long term. Thanks so much.

Great question. So we've got, and Udemy does as well, on their side, a host of different efforts underway to make the platform a more completely AI-native experience throughout so that the courses become much more engaging and interactive, and in the process of doing so, also drive better retention because they're delivering better outcomes for our learners by being more engaging and more interactive and therefore more effective for those learners and actually achieving their end goal, which is gaining a skill. Nine out of 10 consumers on the Coursera platform come to advance their careers. And obviously within the workforce, you need to demonstrate not just that you've taken a course, but that that course has given you a skill that you can apply in your job that has value for your employer. So one of the things that we're very focused on is really expanding everything we do around skill assessment and skill verification. And so how do we, in a lightweight way, as somebody on boards on the platform, really understand where they are against their career goals and what skills they have and that, therefore, what is the right course material and content to help them improve? recognizing that we believe there's a real opportunity for us to deliver value, not just in the formal course itself, but also through the AI-driven interaction that happens around the course. So we have our Coursera AI tutor that rides alongside the learner in every course. We would like that experience to become less of a reactive one and more of a proactive one throughout all of the experience. On the enterprise side, I think the same broadly holds true and really the vision for Altus is a wholly interactive one because it is really deeply integrated into the flow of work and that's what the Udemy team is working on that side. And so a lot of the focus that we have had in all of our integration planning has been around how do we accelerate all of that progress. How do we turn courses into ongoing learning conversations that are far more effective at skill delivery for individuals and also for companies, for enterprises? And we believe that as we do that, that that will deliver to the part of your question around, you know, what does that do in terms of the economics? We believe that as we do that, that'll be on the consumer side of the business, lead to more engagement and therefore more retention. And so we'll have LTV benefits. And then on the enterprise side, we think it's going to be a far stickier business. engagement and interaction, if you can do that, because it's directly engaged into the flow of work. It leverages content, you know, not just from Coursera and Udemy, but also from the enterprise itself, because a lot of what you learn is going to come from content that's actually already in that enterprise. And we see that on the Coursera side reflected in the way that enterprises use course builder to pick selected modules from our Coursera university partners and industry partners and marry those with internal content that they have.

Great. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Stephen Sheldon with William Blair. Please unmute your line and ask a question.

Hey, thanks. I guess just starting from your conversations with corporates, I guess how important is it from their perspective to get learning solutions embedded into the flow of work? It seems like many companies are at least a little behind where they might have hoped to be in terms of getting AI-driven efficiencies across their workforces. And some of that, I think, could just be a lack of AI training and skill development. So I guess if you're successful embedding learning into the flow of work with more partnerships similar to the Microsoft co-pilot agent, how do you think that could impact corporate propensity to spend?

I think it's a little early to forecast the latter part of your question yet. And frankly, Udemy is a little bit ahead of us on this with Altus and their development against that. Obviously, we have the co-pilot announcement that we just made a few weeks ago, which is a great step in the right direction. But I think that enterprises are at very different states of readiness for that. And so I would say that the more advanced the enterprise is on its own journey of implementing AI across the organization, the more that they are interested in implementing in the flow of work integrations versus more traditional integrations, either directly with an enterprise leveraging Coursera on its own or through LMSs or LXPs or other third-party integrations that they might have. And so what we really want to do is skate to where the puck is going. And so that's one of the reasons that we're really excited by the vision of Altus. And it's been great to hear about the response that that has had from enterprise customers on the Udemy side. We obviously aren't very close to that yet because we're still independent companies. But it's one of the reasons that that's a core part of our strategy as we do combine together.

Got it. That's helpful. And then on gross margins in relation to the new platform fee, how should we be thinking about the trend in gross margins in both consumer and enterprise over the balance of the year? Would it be fair to assume a continued progression higher as you continue to win new customers there?

Yeah. Hi, this is Mike. I'll take that. So on the gross margin improvement in our subscription and course for Q1, which was 250 basis points, about directionally half of that was related to the platform fee itself. And that's just the first quarter. As mentioned last quarter, the proportion of revenue on which the platform fee applies increases over time. And so, yes, you should assume that the impact of the platform fee continues to increase quarter on quarter and into 2027. And that's what we anticipate. Obviously, there are other impacts on gross margin, including Coursera produced content, improving gross margin. But also there are mix shift issues there with respect to as consumer grows faster and degrees declines as a proportion, it changes the mix. But with respect to consumer, yeah, you should expect continued improvement there. On enterprise, similarly, the dynamics there with respect to the platform fee, obviously, it only applies to applicable revenue and newly contracted revenue. And so it's slower to adopt in the enterprise side, but it will continue to drive improvement in gross margin on enterprise as well through the year.

Great, thank you.

Our next question comes from Rishi Jaluria with RBC. Please go ahead.

Wonderful, thanks so much. Two questions on my end. Number one, one of the theses that we've worked with of course sarah all of us have is just kind of this idea that as there's you know disruption in the labor market from ai that starts to serve as a little bit of a natural tailwind for you now we've seen we've started to see kind of this you know spike in layoffs, so to speak, being attributed to AI. Now, I think we know a lot of that might be AI washing for the sake of correcting prior inefficiencies. Some of that is literally just freeing up money for CapEx. But nonetheless, there are people who are kind of try to figure out how to cross that skills gap. And that seems to present a big opportunity for you. Can you maybe talk about some of the, you know, efforts you're making, whether it's campaign efforts, AI search, whatever have you, to capitalize on that and really importantly, help these people kind of reskill and upskill for the new post AI world. And then I've got a follow up.

Yeah, that's a great question. And I do think, you know, frankly, that that's one of the factors broadly that is, you know, helping to deliver some of that momentum around AI enrollments that I mentioned in the scripted remarks, you know, now up to 20 per minute. So one every three second globally in AI content. We have done some campaigns in the past specifically around layoffs and when layoffs come out. The challenge is even though the broad trend happens on any given announcement, it's 10,000 people. It's very hard to target those 10,000 people specifically. We would love to be able to do that because we do think that we offer something that's definitely of value. And so instead, what we try and do is just make sure that we're increasing awareness of Coursera generally as a place that people can go to gain the right skills, to be more relevant in the workforce, to help them find the next thing if they have, unfortunately, been impacted by COVID. a reduction in force for whatever reason. I think that one of the things that we're seeing, it just, you know, within the consumer numbers is, you know, this is the fourth consecutive quarter of, you know, 10 plus percent growth. But it's a tale a little bit of geographies. And so we're seeing really rapid growth Outside of the US, we're still growing in the US. We think there's opportunity for that to go north and grow at a faster rate, particularly as we unleash some of the product-led growth strategies that we've been working on. But we're seeing really strong growth in basically every other region. And I think part of that is based on some of the things that we did last year. Geopricing certainly being one of the tailwinds there. Part of it has been that historically we've actually seen higher rates of interest in and enrollment in AI content coming from outside the US. And part of that may be because There are certain geographies in certain countries where they have big portions of the workforce that might be in roles that are even more susceptible to AI than the US. And so India would be a good example. Obviously, a lot of offshoring happened in India. A lot of those types of roles are roles that AI is automating an increasing percentage of. And so we see really strong demand for AI content coming from India. From a revenue perspective, obviously, our pricing in India is much more aligned with GDP per capita in that country. And so therefore, you're not going to see the same revenue reflection, but really strong growth is happening there.

All right, very helpful, thanks. And then maybe just turning to the guide. So look, I mean, you had a pretty skinny beat this quarter, lower than typical. Q2 guiding a little bit light of expectations and understand all the factors at play here. you are maintaining your full, your guide. And I'm just trying to understand what's giving you confidence in kind of that back half number, especially kind of given some of the disruptions we're seeing, given we're starting to see macro pressures on, you know, results, especially in enterprise, you know, as we've seen early in this earning cycle, mainly just trying to kind of really assess like what, what is giving that confidence and why should we not be worried that maybe that there might be another shoe to drop there and, you know, have to rethink the back half ramp. Thanks.

Yeah, thanks. This is Mike. I'll take that. Just first of all, in context on the consumer result for Q1, important to factor in that our subscription and course revenue stream grew meaningfully above the 10%. There's a headwind there from our degrees business that's So we have confidence coming out of Q1 that subscription and course as our core consumer is continuing to have good momentum through the remainder of the year, frankly. Where we're more cautious in our guide for Q2 and maintaining for the full year is on the enterprise side. We continue to see on Coursera for Business a more challenging environment. Some small portion of that is in the Middle East, but really it's an overall macro impact of consolidating Coursera. Tech stacks, L&D budgets being under pressure. We've had that theme for a number of quarters, but we're still seeing it significantly. So we're being very cautious about our outlook on the enterprise side for the remainder of the year. But on our main consumer business, we're seeing good traction there and good double-digit growth continuing. All right. Very helpful. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Josh Baer with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Great. Thank you for the question. I want to just follow up on some of the Coursera for Business commentary that you just gave. I mean, I know the consumer is the piece that's really exciting, double-digit growth, and we'd like you to meet business maybe more advanced in some ways, but there's still 40% of your gross profit coming from the enterprise segment. Wanted to just understand, like how much do you think performance is being impacted by the Udemy merger? Just as far as your own reps, productivity, as far as your customers, like the sales cycles, are they waiting to see what happens? What are you telling customers? And then maybe I have a follow-up.

Yeah, this is Mike. I'll take that and invite Greg to add any thoughts. I don't think we're seeing any significant impact from the Udemy merger per se, meaning we're not seeing customers hesitate or wait for that. I don't think that's a significant factor in the overall environment we're seeing. I do think there is execution. improvements that will take some time to filter through into revenue. Of course, we see it in ACV earlier, but there's execution improvements we can deliver on our enterprise business that I think, frankly, the Udemy business has already seen some benefit from in the past with their higher growth and larger size in their business. So I do think there's opportunity and execution. And Anthony Salcedo, our GM of enterprise, is implementing a number of changes, as mentioned before, to help drive better execution for on the enterprise side overall. So there is opportunity there. I do think just the biggest factor though continues just to be the macro environment. And I think we just continue to see a challenge in growing our ACV in that business, regardless of the other factors. But again, I'll reiterate, I don't think that the merger itself is a significant factor in the performance of our business today.

That's really helpful. And then just so like connecting some of those macro impacts to the 90% net retention rate, is there any theme or, yeah, like a theme or pattern of the customers that are churning dollars, whether it's like a year, a cohort year or a market segment, geography or anything else to note there. Thanks.

I'll get some thoughts on that. I mean, I think we're seeing impacts in larger enterprise where they're downscaling in some cases, their commitment versus necessarily churning. And that is typically an environment where the L&D budgets are under pressure in the larger enterprise space. So that is one segment that I'd point to. And, you know, I think, you know, as you'll know, in the Udemy business, they are a much broader base down to the mid market as well. And so that might be one of the differences you'll see there. So certainly seeing pressure in the larger enterprise, but I'm not sure there are any other big themes to point to or any verticals or other differences. It's kind of fairly broad based. Thank you for the context.

Thanks. Our next question comes from Ryan McDonald with Needon & Company. Please go ahead.

Thanks for taking my questions. Maybe on the consumer business, Greg and Mike, can you remind us as you have some of the new content coming out, specifically the AI content, the launch of the new Google cert, where do you typically see a greater benefit from that content, whether it's Coursera plus subscription adoption or more of a on a course by course basis. And then, you know, based on that, can you talk about sort of the visibility that gives you into the remainder of the year on that consumer business and ability to kind of keep that 10% plus going? Thanks.

Yeah, Ryan, I'll start, and then maybe I'll pass to Mike. On C+, and so as we mentioned a quarter ago, C+, you know, represents more than 50% of our consumer courses and subscription revenue, which is obviously great. That percentage is increasing. And so C plus, you know, continues to increase as a part of the consumer business overall and certainly obviously as part of our courses and subscriptions piece of that separate from degrees. obviously C plus is a better deal than any given course because you get access to, you know, almost the entirety of the catalog within C plus, you know, the vast majority of things are part of C plus. Uh, and so, and we will upsell people from individual courses into C plus as they go through the funnel to help make sure that they recognize that, um, uh, that it is a good deal, uh, for them. Um, So, you know, we expect that that trend will continue, that C-plus is going to continue to increase. One of the things that we saw in Q1 that, you know, had a little bit of an impact on the quarter and will also play out over the rest of the year is our C-plus annual promotion that we always do every year at the start of the year in January, natural time for that type of annual promotion, really performed quite well. And so that has some tailwind benefits across future quarters, but also has a little bit of short-term headwind aspect to it. And so stepping back from all of that, one of the things that we are very focused on as we have more and more interest in AI driven content is really making sure that the product is doing the right job of guiding people to not just the right content immediately, but then also how they continue down that learning journey. So it's not just a course and then you achieve your quote objective and then move on. But Mike, I'll pass it over to you to expand.

Yeah, I just agree with that. I would reiterate that, you know, as we get, you know, when Google content, especially Google AI content comes onto our platform, we get a significant interest in that, significant engagement with it. And, you know, part of the job is to make sure that if somebody just goes through that certification, that they don't drop out at the end of it, that we provide that next moment for them to continue their journey of learning. And that typically is most logically done, as Greg said, with our subscription or broader subscription offering. So it's really capturing the the the. engagement of those users who come in for one thing, and we want to keep them in the platform and continue to broaden their skills around AI and other things. So I hope that helps Ryan a little bit.

Yeah, it does. Thanks. And then maybe just from a follow-up perspective on the enterprise, understand the macro environment being tough, but how much is your, I guess, pipeline progression and building being inhibited, I guess, sort of as you progress towards closing the merger and given, you know, Greg, it sounds like obviously you're, you're kind of bought into be sort of Altus from Udemy being sort of a core tenant of that strategy. So, I mean, I, I guess, how does that impact the pipeline progression and development in the near term? And I guess once the deal is closed, how quickly maybe can you progress and sort of, you know, kind of close those enterprise pipeline initiatives and efforts, you know, post-merger? Thanks.

Yeah, well, first on close, you know, just to remind everyone that we received shareholder approval on both sides on April 9th. We are still awaiting regulatory approval in one country. We are very confident that that will happen. In the near term, we expect that to happen by the end of Q2, and we're very much looking forward to seeing that happen so we can move from integration planning to actual integration and really focusing on putting the pedal to the metal for the combined business. on um on pipeline you know anthony and and mike referenced this a little bit anthony joined you know in october uh he substantially reorganized the team at the start of the year and so it's you know still adapting to a new motion um uh and that you know takes a little bit of time uh in any enterprise uh sales motion uh we feel actually good about the pipeline for the business. And so it's not so much that we feel we're paused to the comment that Mike made earlier. We don't feel like we're paused just because we haven't closed yet. Obviously we do have a shared book of business and maybe I'll let Mike speak to that and how that might play out. But we really want to make sure that given that enterprise, as I mentioned earlier, enterprise integrations, you know, you really need to handle very thoughtfully because people are, you know, using whatever given integration they have in specific ways. And so, yeah. We want to make sure that we do two things at the same time. One, we make really rapid progress towards a new, improved platform that brings some of the best capabilities of each existing platform. And two, that we continue to enhance the existing platforms in the meantime, because our enterprise customers expect that and we expect that for our business as well. Mike, over to you.

Yeah, this wasn't exactly a question, but it's sort of part of the broader perspective. With respect to synergies on the merger, we've said before that the $150 million number, which is very high confidence for us, includes some revenue dis-synergy applied in there. Just to give a little more color on that, because I know it's been a question in prior calls and we haven't given much specificity on it. On the enterprise side, our ARR, combined ARR from a dollar standpoint, there's about 20% overlap between our dollar ARR on the enterprise side. So first of all, that means there's 80% that is not overlapping. We do believe there's a really good opportunity to cross-sell between our customers on that basis, which is not factored into the $115 million gap. But we recognize that on that 20% of overlap, there is some risk with respect to revenue dis-synergy. Clearly, that doesn't appear until the end of the contract period as we bring together two contracts into one. But regardless, we have factored that into getting to our 115 very high confidence at synergy number. And again, just from a timing standpoint, getting to that, the substantial majority of that within 12 months post-close.

Very helpful, Keller. Appreciate it, guys.

Thanks, Ryan. That wraps today's Q&A session. A replay of this webcast will be available shortly on our Investor Relations website. We appreciate you joining us.

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.