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Coursera offers more than 4,600 courses, in addition to professional certification programs and “guided projects” designed to teach professional skills quickly.
Courtesy of Coursera
Coursera shares began trading with a double-digit gain, after the online education company announced an initial public offering at the high end of the range on Tuesday night.
The action was opened on Wednesday at $ 39, up about 18% from the offer price of $ 33. Coursera had said the offering of 15.73 million shares is expected to be priced at $ 30 to $ 33.
Coursera
trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol COUR.
Morgan stanley
and
Goldman Sachs Group
lead the underwriting group.
The offering includes 14.66 million shares sold by the company and 1.07 million sellers sellers. On a fully diluted basis, the company will have 162.7 million shares outstanding after the offer, which will give it a market value of $ 5.4 billion at the offer price.
In 2020, Coursera achieved revenue of $ 293.5 million, up 59% from 2019. The company recorded a net loss of $ 66.6 million.
In an interview with Barron’s CFO Ken Hahn on Wednesday said the company would not support this kind of growth, but would have to be above 30% over time. He also noted that while Coursera has cut losses over time, the company is focusing more on expanding its business than on short-term profitability. The company is burning between $ 20 million and $ 30 million a year in cash and increasing its investment in sales and marketing, he said.
Hahn said the pandemic has “started to change the market,” accelerating the adoption of online education. He says most Coursera users focus on career goals, adding certifications and skills, but some are simply lifelong learners.
Over 90% of Coursera students pay nothing unless they want certifications or diplomas. Almost all of the content on the platform is sourced from third parties, including major universities and industry partners such as Google, Apple, and Amazon Web Services.
In a letter to investors in the offering prospectus, chairman and co-founder Andrew Ng said that when he and Daphne Koller started the company, their mission was to “transform lives through learning.” Koller left the company in 2016.
“We launched Coursera to democratize access to high quality education,” he wrote, saying the company is grateful to the more than 200 universities and educational institutions that have worked with it. Ng cited Michigan, Princeton, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania as institutions that immediately adopted the Coursera approach.
Coursera offers courses for both corporate clients and individuals. The prospectus says the company offers more than 4,600 courses, more than 1,000 “guided projects” for building job skills in under two hours and a variety of job certification programs.
The company said that at the end of 2020, it had more than 77 million learners registered on the platform. Coursera said it has over 2,000 business customers. In 2020, 66% of revenue came from consumers, 24% from corporate clients and 10% from study programs.
After the offer, the firm’s biggest investors will include venture capitalists New Enterprise Associates, with a 16.4% stake; G squared, with 14.1%; Kleiner Perkins, at 8.2%; and Future Fund, Australia’s sovereign wealth fund, with 7%.
The Coursera filing reports that investment firms Baillie Gifford and Capital Research have each expressed an interest in purchasing up to $ 125 million of shares as part of the IPO offering.
Write to Eric J. Savitz at [email protected]
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