Khan Academy has received $365M in donations and saw an important boost during the pandemic.

When Class Central covered the Coursera-Udemy merger completion, Hugo Sarrazin’s role was unclear. Not anymore. He’s joining Avalara, a tax and compliance company, as CEO. Here’s the thing. Neither an SEC filing nor a public post announced the departure of the 14-month CEO, which led Udemy to its first profitable year and the $2.5 billion all-stock merger. The Quiet Exit The Coursera-Udemy merger was completed on May 11, 2026. Coursera even released a completion 8-K once it was done. Sarrazin,

In Q4 2025, Duolingo announced it would let go of $50M in bookings to reach 100 million daily active users (DAUs) by 2028; a strategy Class Central covered in detail last month.  2026 is its “investment year,” and Q1 was the first quarter of execution. So far, the plan seems to be working. The Expected Results: Low Bookings, High DAUs Duolingo is running multiple tests to improve the free experience: spoken tokens for speaking practice, Speaking Adventures for real-world conversations, and fla

Online education company 2U implements fifth round of layoffs since its disastrous $800 million acquisition of edX in 2021.

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

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