Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to Coursera's Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] And this call is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] 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 Q4 and Full Year 2025 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, and it is available on our Investor Relations website at investor.coursera.com where this call is being webcast live and reversions 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. Please refer today's earnings press release, shareholder letter and SEC filings 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 fourth quarter. Over the past year, we've been focused on a clear set of priorities to build a more durable foundation for long-term growth, sharpening our execution refining how we operate and embedding faster AI native product innovation and data-driven decision-making across the business. 2025 marked the early phase of this work. As the year progressed, we began to demonstrate tangible progress reflected in our results. For the full year, we grew revenue to $757 million, an increase of 9% year-over-year and more than double the 4% growth rate we shared in our initial April outlook. We generated record free cash flow of $78 million, up 32% from the prior year and we extended our track record of delivering growth with increased financial leverage, expanding annual adjusted EBITDA margin by 240 basis points year-over-year to 8.4% and while continuing to invest in the next generation of product experiences. Our results reflect a more focused, disciplined company, one that's translating strategy into faster execution. I'm proud of the early progress our team has made, and I'm equally clear that we must and will continue to move faster. In December, we announced an agreement to combine with you to me, a company and team we have long admired. This transaction is an important step in accelerating our strategy. By bringing together 2 highly complementary platforms, operating models and cultures, we meaningfully increase our collective ability to invest, innovate and execute at scale. Just as importantly, this combination reinforces the direction we have been taking all year, building a more agile, more focused and more capable company and evolving beyond a content catalog into a leading technology platform for skills. More broadly, the environment around us continues…

Thank you, Greg, and good afternoon, everyone. Coursera finished 2025 in a position of financial strength. We delivered double-digit year-over-year revenue growth for the last 3 consecutive quarters, expanded our gross and adjusted EBITDA margins and generated strong cash flow while continuing to invest in strengthening the long-term fundamentals of the business. These investments are focused on building platform capabilities that learners and customers increasingly require as skills change more quickly. The results I'll discuss today reflect how we're managing and planning the business on a stand-alone basis. I'll begin with our fourth quarter results and then walk through our guidance and outlook assumptions for the first quarter and full year 2026. In the fourth quarter, we delivered total revenue of $197 million, up 10% from the prior year period, driven by growth across both our Consumer and Enterprise segments. Please note that for the remainder of this call, I will discuss our non-GAAP financial measures unless otherwise stated. Gross profit was $109 million, up 12% year-over-year, representing a 55% gross margin, an expansion of approximately 90 basis points from the prior year period. Margin expansion was driven primarily by continued improvement in our consumer segment, reflecting higher learner engagement with newer content created under more favorable production arrangements. These arrangements typically feature lower revenue share and content costs, reflecting the growing role our technology and authoring capabilities play in enabling high-quality learning experiences at scale. Additionally, as we deliver faster innovation cycles and our reach continues to grow, we will continue to explore structural opportunities to improve unit economics over time. including the platform fee Greg mentioned earlier, which took effect at the start of 2026. This structure better aligns economics with the value our technology delivers, while supporting continued investment in innovation. I'll share more detail on the…

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Stephen Sheldon with William Blair.

First, I wanted to ask about the platform fee that sounds like you introduced in January. I guess can you just give a little bit more color on the structure of that? How much of a lift do you think that could be to gross margins over time? And I guess, as you've kind of pushed that out there and communicated it, has there been any pushback in the system that you've seen regarding the fee?

Maybe I'll start and then Mike can add on. Thanks for the question, Stephen. So a couple of us. First of all, the intent of the platform fee, as was indicated in the scripted remarks is to enable us to invest in an ongoing way in continuing to improve the platform. And by doing so to deliver better outcomes for our learners and for our content partners as well. . They've obviously been pleased with the growth that we've shown, particularly over Q2 through Q4 with 10% growth in each of those quarters. And the intent of the platform fee is to enable ongoing investment and product initiatives that will help further that growth. They're obviously curious to get better visibility into what some of those investments might be and what our 2026 road map looks like. As Mike mentioned in his scripted remarks, the impact of the fee on gross margin because of the nature of the fee and the nature of our revenue recognition with an increasing percentage of our consumer business being related to our subscription Coursera Plus. And so the revenue gets recognized over a longer time period. The same is obviously true in our enterprise business as well. And so that's a little bit of color behind what Mike referenced in more impact will be reflected in our financials in the back half of the year. Mike, over to you.

Yes. I would just add in terms of gross margin overall, we do expect to continue to make improvements in progress on gross margin in the aggregate the platform fee is a significant component of that in 2026, along with continued investment in Coursera produced content. . Of course, we also have offsetting that, the mix of revenue, our fastest-growing business in our consumer subscription is our lower margin business. and enterprise growing slower as our higher-margin business. So there's a mix shift to offset that from an overall gross margin percentage basis. But it is a meaningful uplift in the platform fee for the second half of the year and definitely into 2027.

Got it. Yes, that makes sense. And then following up -- can you just dig a little deeper on where you're making incremental investments in the business as you thought about the 2026 budget? Are there specific areas where you're reinvesting more than you have historically? Just given some of the comments in the prepared remarks, it sounds like you have a lot of product ambitions. But just any color on where you're kind of pushing the pedal a little bit more than you historically have. .

Yes, I can take that. So we'll continue to invest in our sales and marketing to drive new leaner acquisition. We've seen significant improvements in efficiency over 2025. In that spend, we expect to see more efficiency in 2026. The other area, as Greg alluded to, is in R&D, and we are expecting to invest more in R&D this year. Part of that is hiring that we've already done and part of that is continued investment in software tools and more engineering and product into 2026. So those will be the 2 areas I'd highlight. G&A would just grow modestly this year.

Our next question comes from Josh Baer with Morgan Stanley.

I was hoping you could talk a little bit about some of the proprietary data sets that you have that would make it hard for an LLM or a new entrant to create learning content and more broadly, like the platform that you have that can enable skilling and reskilling and facilitate workforce transformation. So some of the data or competitive moat there. .

Yes, I'll start on that one, Josh. Thank you for the question. So a couple of thoughts on that. First of all, we ingest a lot of data from external third-party sources. That data is presumably also some of it available to some of our other participants in the space, whether there's LOMs or others. It's what we do with that, that I think is a bit unique. And so what we are trying to do, 86% of the learners who come to Coursera come to grow their careers. And what we're really focused on doing is delivering a mapping of the skills that they need to do so in whatever particular career they might be pursuing to the courses on Coursera that deliver those skills. And then specifically, the modules within those courses that deliver those skills and then how we verify those skills at scale. We just actually rolled out the launch of our verified skills path across a number of different career groupings for our enterprise partners, which has been something that we've been working on since September. The goal is to continue to innovate on that. And obviously, we use all of the data that we have on our platform from within the learning experience from within courses, within given modules, of course, is about what is driving engagement, what is driving true mastery of those skills and how do we double down on that. It's one of the ways that we actually use Coursera produced content as a test bed to figure out which optimizations drive the highest learner engagement, the highest course completion rates the most correlation with skill mastery and development. So we do think that we have a differentiated set of data across both how we use external data how we map that to the skills that we build on our platform for our learners and then how we use the learning experience itself, which is very different on Coursera than it might be in a chat environment. In an LLM to deliver a far better outcome for those learners. And we just released our learner outcomes report about 2 or 3 weeks ago. One of the things we see is that 46% of learners on Coursera report a salary increase since enrolling in their course or program on Coursera. So we believe there's a strong correlation between the input of learning on Coursera and the output that learners are coming to Coursera to achieve, which is to grow their career.

Great. And just wondering, just a little confused on the platform fee. Like is there a difference between the platform fee and a pricing increase for new customers? .

Pricing for customers is not impacted. There is no change to consumer pricing or enterprise pricing for that matter.

Our next question comes from Ryan MacDonald with Needham.

Congrats on a nice quarter here, guys. This is Matt Shea on for Ryan. Wanted to touch on international. It seems like it's been a real bright spot the last couple of quarters. 2-parter here. Maybe first, on the translation side, you achieved your goal of 100 courses with AI doing across 5 languages. It seems like this has been particularly helpful in unlocking international learners. I guess given that success, how much more translation could be in store for 2026? And how immediate is that benefit? And then maybe second, geo-based pricing was a big topic last quarter that seems to be bearing fruit. How has that evolved? And any plans to roll out incremental geo-based pricing to new countries in 2026?

Great question, Matt. So a couple of thoughts on that. First of all, yes, we are absolutely going to continue to expand the number of courses that we have translated both through AIW, but also just through machine translation of text. We believe that -- and the data shows that learners are far more likely to engage in courses that are in their native language and ideally in that native language through verbal audio, not just through text. So we're going to continue to invest in that area. It's also something that our enterprise customers will often ask for in certain geographies to make sure that they get the right content for their workforces in those native languages. It's also one of the reasons just sort of stepping back and thinking a little bit about the combination with Udemy, that's really interesting for us because Udemy has 85,000-plus instructors from around the world, creating content in a huge range of languages. And so we believe that will be a fantastic addition to better serve learners around the world. The other thing that you mentioned about geo pricing. So we're definitely pleased with the results that we've seen from geo pricing. We think there is further opportunity to keep looking at that type of change to our pricing model just to make it more responsive to actual purchasing power in different countries around the world. And so I do expect that over the course of 2026, we'll continue to look at that and make sure that we're fine-tuning that in the right way.

Got it. I appreciate that color. Maybe one on the combination with you to me. At the time of the announcement, it was a bit early to gauge feedback from the instructor base, but now assuming you've had a chance to connect with partners, how do your university and enterprise partners feel about this combination and conversely, to the extent you can share, I guess, any additional feedback from outman structures about how they feel about the combination?

Well, I'll start by saying that we firmly believe that the combination will provide far better outcomes for every participant in our value chain. So from a content creator perspective, Coursera has now 197 million registered learners. Udemy has 82 million plus registered learners so approaching 300 million with the combination. . Then from a -- and obviously, 300 million registered learners on the consumer side of the business is a massive audience that any content creator, whether that's a university partner of ours, an industry partner of ours. -- or a subject matter expert in structure from Udemy's network can reach through this combination. And so we believe that will absolutely expand their capacity to tap into new audiences and deliver effective learning for them. For learners, obviously, they benefit from more content they benefit from all the content being created, not just by Courseras 375 different university and industry partners, but from the 85,000 plus subject matter experts on the Udemy side. And then finally, for enterprise, we have 1,700-odd enterprise customers, Udemy has 17,000. And so that is a huge audience, again, the content creators can develop content for and serve and a real opportunity to grow their business through that. I would say that the feedback that we've had has really been how is this going to work, which is a logical and completely fair question. And we have to think through that really carefully. The last thing we would want is to simply have a content soup of content from all of these different instructors and institutions. And so we want to make sure that we do a good job of developing the right experience. We will develop that with feedback from those audiences. Obviously, we can't really do that right now when we're pretty close. But as we get post close, getting input and feedback from those audiences as we build out the integration into a single platform is going to be an important part of our plan.

Our next question comes from the Nafeesa Gupta with Bank of America.

Am I audible?

Any so we can hear you.

My question is on -- firstly, in terms of Udemy merger, any potential time lines for it? I know it was mentioned second half of the year, but any updates on that? And is there any regulatory hurdles that you see in that process?

Yes. This is Mike. I can take that. Yes. So no real updates to that yet. We're moving forward with the regulatory filings and shareholder and SEC filings with good pace. Our guidance continues to be the second half. But frankly, there's a wide range of potential outcomes there. There's a theoretical path to being side than the second half of the year. or it could be later than that. So no real update at this point in terms of timing. I'm sorry, the second half of your question?

The second question I have is on your traffic from AI platforms. You partnered with OpenAI and Gemini and then -- you also talked about MCP based discovery capabilities for 2026. So what kind of traffic are you seeing from these ad platforms? And what do you expect going forward?

At a high level, it's still very early days in terms of the integration with OpenAI and chat GPT. We continue to collaborate with them on building out and improving that experience, but still really early days, so nothing substantive to share at this stage. I think what you're seeing more broadly is that we get a different type of traffic from the than you would have historically seen from search. And so you see higher intent on traffic coming through from the ALM. And so we're pleased by that. But it's still very early days in terms of the actual integration that we have with ChatGPT .

Got it. And if I may, one last one. On the platform fee, is that like a onetime fee for any new subscription on consumer or enterprise? Or is that like an ongoing monthly fee? Or like how does that work? And could you also remind us what percentage of your consumer is in subscriptions?

Yes. The platform fee, it applies to new revenue in 2026 on related to eligible content. So not all of our content categories as noted earlier, and it effectively is 15% that comes, if you like, off the top before we calculate the revenue share payments to our content partners. So that's how it works, and it's an ongoing fee.

And again, there's no change to consumer pricing or enterprise pricing connected with the platform fee.

Our next question comes from Brian Peterson with Raymond James.

This is Jessica on for Brian. In your commentary on your guidance, if I see consumers agented to grow over 10%. Even you consider potential headwinds you're expecting from the Greece segment, what are the main drivers of the strengths that are expected in consumer? Like are we considering a subscription continuing a higher mix of the revenue? Or is that you're continuing to bring in more learners or just converting learners are just like a higher price points. So what -- how should we be considering all the factors involved here?

Well, at a high level, I'll start and then Mike can certainly join in our subscriptions and courses piece of our consumer business continues to be the fastest-growing piece of our consumer business. And we expect that to continue to be true in 2026. We are pouring more energy into that, both on the external marketing side, from a paid marketing perspective, but also within the platform. It is, by far, the best value from a learner perspective. And so it makes the most sense for people to subscribe to Coursera plus either monthly or annually depending on their learning goals. So you should expect that to increase. The other investments that we are making, Mike referenced the fact that we'll continue to invest in sales and marketing and driving that efficiently, which we've done over the course of 2025, and we also anticipate that continuing. Mike, do you want to add some more color?

No, I think that's right. The only thing I would add is one of the things that gives us confidence here around that rural is the momentum that we had in Q4 around subscription and courses and not just the monthly subscription, but real strength and momentum in our annual subscription. So that gives the continued fast growth of our annual subscription gives us increasing confidence against the delivery of the number for 2026. So the combination of product-like growth improvements. We've seen an uptick in retention in Q4. So we'll get various signals that give us confidence in the outlook for '26.

It's really great to hear. And a follow-up then also in your enterprise segment, NRR is like inflected back to 93% this quarter. As we're thinking about the rest of this year, while it's crores, but also potentially following the Udemy merger, what are the main priorities you're still considering within the segment? And how like are you thinking about leading with pad development? Or what other aspects are you considering to be improving the segment and continuing driving its performance.

I'll start with the NRR comment, and hand to Greg for the priorities. So yes, we're pleased to see the uptick from 89% previous quarter to 93%. But overall, we're not pleased with the number. We won't be happy with our number until it's frankly above 100%. So we've got -- we know we have a lot of progress to make there. A number of the changes that we made operationally in our enterprise business and have been, I think, very positive. We have a relatively new general manager and enterprise be here around 4 months, made a number of significant changes to just how we go to market there that I think are going to bear fruit. But based by the nature of that business, we would likely see the impact of that. until probably the back half, if not into 2027. But I'm confident that we'll see improvements just operationally there. the uptick for this quarter was really driven by one large expansion at least half of that uptick was one large expansion in our government business in Asia, and that sort of was a fairly needle-moving deal on that front. And so that was a positive. But we don't as yet see sort of trend of continuous improvement in that number for this year until we start to see the fruits of both product led growth as well as the improvements in the operations that I mentioned earlier.

And then maybe just to speak a little bit to the question that you had, Jessica, about the combination with Udemy and their enterprise business. So their enterprise business is obviously much larger than ours. They are roughly 2/3 enterprise, 1/3 consumer, and we are the inverse of that, 2/3 consumer, 1/3 enterprise. The combination will give us a company with pro forma revenue of $1.5 billion roughly that is roughly 50% consumer, 50% enterprise. They are, frankly, ahead of us on a number of things with enterprise, not just from a revenue perspective, but also from a product perspective. That's one of the things that's really appealing and interesting about the combination in the same way that we are ahead of them in many ways on the consumer side of our offering from a product perspective, not just a revenue perspective. And so the opportunity to bring all of that under 1 roof and 1 platform and offer that to both consumer and enterprise customers is really appealing and to do that in a way that helps on the consumer side. Do an increasingly better job of delivering -- helping learners find the right skills that they need to grow their careers enabling them to more easily learn and master those skills and demonstrate through verified assessment of those skills, that ability to potential employers. On the enterprise side, the ability to do all of those same things from an upskilling and reskilling perspective, but also to do that within the flow of work through MCP integrations and really deep integrations directly into enterprise systems. And so we are very excited about the opportunity that this combination creates to do all of that

We will take our final question from Devin Au with KeyBanc.

And congrats on a strong quarter. When I look at the first quarter guidance at the midpoint of the revenue guide, I think it's contemplating sort of a greater decline quarter-over-quarter in growth than prior years. I know you've kind of called out around 100 bps of headwind from degrees, but is there any other kind of factors that's worth highlighting and driving the larger sequential decline?

I would just point to -- on the enterprise side, we continue to have good momentum with Coursera for campus. The largest part of that business, of course, is Coursera business. And we're just taking a cautious outlook there for the remainder of the year. We'll see what happens in the year. There's -- the macroeconomic environment remains uncertain as it did through 2025. So I would just say that we're taking a cautious view on how that -- how the year plays out on the Coursera business, just with the lack of visibility that we have on how that plays out over the next 4 quarters. That would be the only real thing I would point to.

The one other thing I might just build off Mike's response is, as we see more of our consumer revenue come from Coursera plus subscriptions. And as we see increasing success in Coursera Plus annual subscriptions, the revenue recognition of that plays out, obviously, over a far longer time horizon than a normal a la carte course purchase or Cs monthly. And so that's also a factor as you think about what happens in Q1 specifically.

Got it. I appreciate the context. And just a quick follow-up question. Looking at the kind of net new enterprise accounts that you've added in the quarter, kind of a step down in terms of net add. If you look at the past couple of quarters or a few years, can you maybe unpack that a little bit? Have you seen any kind of deals kind of pushed out in 2016 that would explain that? Just any color would be helpful.

Well, every quarter, you also have deals that push out that you don't want to. I wouldn't say it was necessarily any worse in this quarter on that particular dimension than it is on others. I think I would just echo sort of what Mike said a little bit earlier about some of the macro trends that we're seeing play out in the C4B segment. C4C, we've had some good strength in that. We continue to be uniquely positioned to serve that. particular segment really well, but it's a smaller piece of our enterprise business. And then C4G has natural sort of lumpiness in that particular part of the business just because you have typically annual government contracts versus multiyear deals. And so you see that kind of move up and down, and we've seen that historically as well.

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.