Udemy, Inc. Q2 FY2025 Earnings Call

Good day, and welcome to Udemy's Second Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. Please note that this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Dennis Walsh, Udemy's Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you. Joining me today are Udemy's Chief Executive Officer, Hugo Sarrazin; and Chief Financial Officer, Sarah Blanchard. During this conference call, we will make forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities laws. These statements involve assumptions and are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed or anticipated. For a complete discussion of risks associated with these forward-looking statements, we encourage you to refer to our most recent Form 10-K and 10-Q filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Our forward-looking statements are based upon information currently available to us. We caution you not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, and we do not undertake and expressly disclaim any duty or obligation to update or alter our forward-looking statements, except as required by applicable law. During this call, certain financial performance measures may be discussed that differ from comparable measures contained in our financial statements, which are prepared in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles referred to by the SEC as non-GAAP financial measures. We believe that these non-GAAP financial measures support management and investors in evaluating our performance and comparing period-to-period results of operations in a more meaningful and consistent manner. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measures is included in our earnings press release. These reconciliations, together with additional supplemental information, are available on the Investor Relations section of our website. A replay of today's call will also be posted on the website. With that, I will now turn the call over to Hugo.

Thank you, Dennis, and good afternoon, everyone. Udemy reported a strong quarter as we exceeded expectations for revenue and adjusted EBITDA. This year we've been very focused on driving operational improvements to set ourselves for efficient growth acceleration. Separately, we have made significant progress on our strategic priorities. This firmly positions us for growth acceleration in the coming quarters. Q2 revenues were $200 million, up 3% year-over-year and above the high end of our guidance range. Revenue for our Udemy Business segment, which I remind you is our main growth engine, increased 7% year-over-year, and we ended the quarter with an ARR of $520 million. On the bottom line, we delivered positive GAAP net income for the first time since our IPO, and adjusted EBITDA was stronger than expected. I'm very proud of the Udemy team for achieving this major milestone and for delivering another successful quarter. It's now been four months since I joined Udemy as CEO. In that short period of time, we've taken decisive actions to strengthen our leadership team, refine our strategic focus and accelerate product innovation. Our early progress reinforces my confidence in Udemy's potential and demonstrates our newfound ability to execute with urgency. With that in mind, I want to share some updates in our strategic priorities, which include: number one, increasing our emphasis on subscription products; number two, expanding our partnership ecosystem and third-party channels; number three, executing comprehensive global market activation; and number four, most importantly, positioning Udemy as the leading AI-powered skill acceleration platform. This will increasingly differentiate us vis-a-vis our competition. We are not playing the same games as others. During Q2, we made early and impactful progress across each of these priorities. Let me go through each one of them. First, we continue to emphasize subscription products across our business. With approximately 70% of our top line now subscription-based, we are building a more predictable revenue stream. During Q2, we surpassed a milestone of 200,000 paid consumer subscribers, and revenue from subscription accounted for 15% of the Consumer segment, up 2 points from Q1. It is exciting to see that progress in just one quarter of focused effort by our team. To better serve individual learners navigating career transition, we will be expanding our subscription offering with multiple options aligned to specific career goals. We're now on track to grow consumer subscription to more than 250,000 by year-end. We plan to more than double that next year. Beginning later this quarter, we will pilot programmatic advertising across our free course on udemy.com. We believe there is a significant opportunity to unlock a new revenue stream through advertising by monetizing our audience. This will also strengthen our upsell motion to our paid subscription offering. Second, we're expanding our partnership ecosystem to extend our reach and impact. In April, we announced a strategic partnership with Indeed to integrate Udemy's comprehensive content with its vast career marketplace. This creates a seamless solution for individuals looking to advance their careers and for employers seeking skilled talent. We also recently entered into a partnership with UKG, a leading provider of HR, payroll, and workforce management solutions. Udemy Business can now be integrated with UKG Pro and UKG Ready. This enables streamlined enterprise learning management that aligns with existing workflows and simplifies administrative work for L&D professionals. We also extended our reach in the LatAm market through a new reseller partnership with BCN Global, an influential technical training organization in the region. We aim to create strategic reseller partnerships like this in each of our priority markets, following the playbook we've developed with Benesse in Japan. Finally, we are adding new revenue streams to include reselling certification and closing the learning to credential loop by providing enterprise customers with accurate data such as employees' test completion. Each of these examples provides an early look at how we expect to unlock further revenue growth through our global partnership strategy. Third, we're taking decisive action to drive growth in key regions through global market activation. We launched targeted campaigns and localized content strategy in high-opportunity markets such as Brazil, India, and Japan, that we expect will increase engagement with Udemy and improve conversion. Specifically, in Japan, our second largest market, we appointed a new GM a few months ago to address some softness in that market. We quickly took action to refine our go-to-market and operational approach, and we are already seeing tremendous results. For Q2, we delivered double-digit year-over-year ARR growth and the highest gross retention in over three years. This strong performance demonstrates the significant international market opportunity and the actions we took provide a blueprint we are now applying to other regions. Finally, as I mentioned earlier, positioning Udemy as a leading AI-powered skill acceleration platform is and will increasingly be a source of differentiation. I want to remind you, we are pursuing a different product positioning than our competitor. The future of talent development is rapidly converging with the widespread adoption of AI. Very soon, every employee will need ongoing personalized expert support at their fingertips. This evolution represents a significant market opportunity that Udemy is uniquely positioned to capture with our unparalleled collection of more than 250,000 courses covering virtually every professional skill domain. That is our data moat. It is hard for traditional publishers to keep up with Udemy's pace, particularly with fast-moving AI. Our dynamic marketplace motivates instructors to create content and keep it fresh. For example, vibe coding has recently experienced a rapid rise in demand. This new approach to software development leverages LLMs to generate code. Udemy's instructor community responded fast to the demand signal, and we now offer more than 100 courses on the topic. Compare that to fewer than 20 offered across leading competitors' platforms combined. Our marketplace model is stronger in a fast-moving AI world. We are launching a beta test of our model context protocol server with our enterprise customer. We are the first to do so in our category. This technology is designed to help organizations embed personalized learning directly in the flow of work for employees. Our MCP server allows organizations to access targeted learning within AI-powered applications such as cloud and ChatGPT. This helps employees build skills in real-time without disrupting productivity. Ultimately, we aim to create personalized assistants for every employee. Since announcing our beta program last week, we have received an overwhelming response from enterprise customers that want to be included. Innovation like this perfectly illustrates how we are repositioning Udemy to be differentiated as an AI-powered skill acceleration platform. To win this race, we need to be more than a destination for high-quality content. We are evolving Udemy to be an essential partner with our powerful suite of AI tools embedded throughout the enterprise technology stack to provide personalized support to every employee. Udemy has more than 4,500 courses on Gen AI, which is nearly five times the amount as one of our top competitors. Paid enrollment across these courses recently surpassed 11 million. As discussed previously, we are making important changes to the way we merchandise our offering. During the quarter, we saw early success from two new SKUs for enterprise customers: AI readiness and AI growth packages. These packages are designed to help organizations build AI fluency across their entire organization, not just technical roles. Let me share some examples. During Q2, a large global medical technology company partnered with Udemy to launch an AI fluency initiative to approximately 40% of its employees this year. They selected Udemy's new AI research package for the breadth and freshness of our AI content, for the quality of our AI assistant, our AI-powered skill mapping, and our one-of-a-kind role-play experience. Another example is Devoteam in Europe, a long-time Udemy business customer and AI-driven digital transformation company. Devoteam recently implemented a Gen AI literacy program across their organization using Udemy's AI learning path and content. Within a few months, approximately 70% of their employees participated in the training. This initiative was effective at building critical AI skills for employees in all roles and functions, while contributing to a 4% reduction in attrition. And finally, Prodapt, a telecom service provider, engaged Udemy to leverage AI-driven learning to thrive in a hybrid era. The organization needed to ensure employees across global locations could access meaningful, engaging learning opportunities without disrupting their workflow. Ultimately, the program delivered meaningful business outcomes, achieving 90% organization-wide AI literacy, 75% of previously unassigned employees moving directly into revenue-generating client projects. This comprehensive approach enabled them to transform their technical talent and deliver more innovative solutions to their clients. What I like about these examples is that they are all companies that need their workforce to be at the leading edge of AI, and they chose Udemy as their partner. Turning to AI products. We are thrilled to have Ozzie Goldschmied as our new Chief Technology Officer. Ozzie's deep expertise in AI, machine learning, cloud technology, and scaling businesses will be invaluable as we accelerate product innovation and enhance our AI-powered learning platform. During Q2, we accelerated our product development and innovation. Let me give you a few examples. In May, we launched AI-powered roleplay, which allowed professionals to practice and refine their skills in realistic scenarios with an AI coach. I am thrilled to say that the reception has been exceptional. We have more than 7,000 unique roleplay creations by instructors. That's more than the entire category combined. This is a testament to the advantage we can leverage by building AI tools to support content creation and launching them through our more than 85,000 instructors. We also provided Udemy Business customers with the ability to create custom roleplays. This has resulted in hundreds of new roleplays being introduced to their employees all over the world and strengthened our stickiness with those customers. The AI roleplay unlocks substantial new market opportunities beyond NLP. For example, we will be exploring bespoke solutions for sales enablement and customer service. At the end of the year, we launched our in-course AI assistant, which continues to gain traction. The assistant helps learners navigate content, answer questions and deepen their understanding of complex topics. The early data is exciting, and we are seeing that learners are more engaged, have stronger retention, and higher completion rates. But this is only the first step towards a broader personalized AI assistant. We are working to ingest our broad course catalog to provide more engaging and multimodal experiences to our learners. We also expanded our creative capabilities for instructors with the addition of Lummi. These design tools are integrated into our content creator workflow, allowing them to leverage AI to develop more engaging, interactive content, which enhances the learning experience. Our investment in AI is transforming the learning experience while also fundamentally enhancing the economics for our instructors. We are building a virtuous cycle that enhances our competitive advantage. We want our instructor partners to earn more from our platform. When they earn more, they create more fresh in-demand content, and that content attracts more customers, and their engagement generates more data to further advance our AI capabilities. As we enhance their economics, we ensure that Udemy maintains the most current, comprehensive and engaging platform in the category. As we look forward to the rest of the year, we are increasingly encouraged by the signals we are seeing. The majority of our business is B2B. As you know, it takes time to move metrics on all enterprise businesses, but I'm excited about what I'm seeing. I like the early traction from our new AI SKUs. I like our increasing enterprise win rate, and I like the pace of building our pipeline. For consumer, we saw subscription GMV growth of over 40% year-over-year in June, and it's tracking towards 50% year-over-year in July. While these early indicators have not yet translated into top-line reacceleration, we believe we are nearing an inflection point as we shift our focus towards accelerating growth. Before handing it over to Sarah, I want to emphasize that to keep up with the pace of change from AI, Udemy's instructor-powered marketplace provides a unique advantage that publishers cannot match. In addition, we are the first in our category to reposition our solution to be an AI platform. This moves us away from being a content catalog, creating new forms of value and creating stickiness for our enterprise customers. Lastly, our evolving platform becomes more resilient to inroads that horizontal LLMs are likely to make in our space. With that, I'll now turn it to Sarah.

Thank you, Hugo. I'll cover the key financial highlights and our outlook. A complete set of financial tables is available on our Investor Relations website. As we move down the P&L, note that all financial metrics other than revenue are non-GAAP, unless stated otherwise. I'll start by walking you through the high-level details of the results, and then I'll share some of the green shoots we are seeing. As Hugo mentioned, we delivered strong second quarter results with revenue above the high end of our guidance range. I'm particularly pleased that profitability exceeded our expectations. We achieved a significant milestone in Udemy's financial journey with our first quarter of positive GAAP net income since our IPO. This achievement represents a culmination of our disciplined approach to balancing growth investments with operational efficiency. We have established a solid financial foundation that provides us with increased flexibility to pursue organic and inorganic growth opportunities that align with our vision and accelerate our market position. In the second quarter, revenue of $200 million increased 3% year-over-year, including a negative 1 point headwind from FX. Our Udemy Business segment delivered revenue of $129 million, a 7% increase year-over-year with minimal impact from FX headwinds. Udemy Business ARR reached $520 million at the end of Q2, representing 6% year-over-year growth, driven by an increase in total customers and average contract value for new customers. That growth was partially offset by lower expansions and higher churn, primarily from the SMB cohort. ARR from large customers increased by 7% year-over-year, and we've closed nearly 40 new business deals over $100,000 in ARR during the quarter. Multiple leading indicators suggest we are approaching an inflection point in our growth trajectory, with several metrics pointing to an acceleration in the coming quarters. I'll share more about that in a moment. Our Consumer segment generated revenue of $71 million, down as expected 4% year-over-year, including a negative 2 percentage point impact from FX. I do want to call out that during the quarter, we recorded a one-time benefit of $2.5 million from consumer breakage revenue that is not expected to be as meaningful in future periods. Gross margin improved 300 basis points year-over-year to 67%, driven by our continued focus on growing subscription products and the revenue share adjustments we implemented earlier this year. Operating expenses were $112 million or 56% of revenue, an 800 basis point improvement compared to Q2 2024, reflecting our continued focus on operational efficiency. On the bottom line, I'm particularly proud that we delivered positive GAAP net income of approximately $6 million, a remarkable improvement from a loss of $32 million in Q2 of last year. Adjusted EBITDA was approximately $28 million or 14% of revenue, representing an 1100 basis point year-over-year expansion and marking our 14th consecutive quarter of exceeding expectations on the bottom line. This consistent profitability growth demonstrates our commitment to disciplined cost management and provides us with significant flexibility to accelerate investments in high-growth opportunities. We generated $39 million in free cash flow during the quarter or 20% of revenue. Our balance sheet remains strong with $393 million in cash and marketable securities at the end of the quarter. Now turning to the green shoots I mentioned earlier. I want to highlight several encouraging leading indicators. First, during Q2, we generated our highest amount of $100,000-plus deals in the pipeline since 2022. This was not just a few large deals, but rather a broad-based increase in the number of substantial opportunities. The majority of the overall increase came from North America, but we saw a healthy increase across other regions as well. In just the first few weeks of the third quarter, our North America, APAC, and LatAm markets are all showing year-over-year growth in total open pipeline. We are on the other side of the go-to-market team restructure, and we expect net new ARR to be up meaningfully in the third quarter and in the fourth quarter more in alignment with what we saw in Q4 of last year. Second, Udemy Business win rates increased during the quarter. Over the past few quarters, we have seen an increase in expansion deals as our upmarket focus on increasing penetration is starting to play out. Those deals typically convert at higher rates than new business, reflecting the increasing value customers are finding in our platform. Third, new bookings from our self-service team plan subscription product grew more than 35% year-over-year. Although still a relatively small portion of our overall bookings, the offering represents another high-margin growth lever and is a valuable source of organic lead generation. Finally, in our Consumer segment, we are beginning to see early signs of traction with our efforts to prioritize subscription products and stabilize the overall consumer business. As you heard from Hugo, subscription GMV increased by more than 40% year-over-year in June. These are all early indicators that signal we are near an inflection point. Delivering sustainable long-term growth requires both winning new business and maximizing the lifetime value of existing customers. Our consolidated net dollar retention rate was 95% at the end of Q2 with large customers at 99%. Our new Chief Customer Experience Officer is already making a meaningful impact on our renewal process and customer success motion. Since net dollar retention is a trailing metric, these improvements will take time to be reflected in our reported numbers. We are also in the final stages of renewing our COVID cohort of Udemy Business customers who entered into multi-year contracts in 2022. These deals present unique challenges as many were established without the foundations we now have in place. Our newer contracts feature more robust implementation, clearer value metrics, and stronger executive sponsorship. These are all factors that contribute to healthier renewals and expansions over time. Finally, we have outsourced the SMB renewals process to a third-party retention optimization firm. This allows us to prioritize our internal resources to drive further penetration of the upmarket opportunity. As a result, we expect net dollar retention to bottom out in Q3, be flat in Q4, and accelerate in the first quarter of 2026. Now for our outlook. The market opportunity continues to expand, particularly as AI transforms the nature of work across all industries. This shift is fundamentally changing roles from execution to orchestration, moving professionals from doing work to reviewing and coordinating work with the support of AI agents. This evolution requires widespread and continuous workforce upskilling. For the third quarter, we expect revenue to be between $190 million and $195 million. Assuming exchange rates remain constant, we expect headwinds from FX on our forward revenue to be minimal. The midpoint of the guidance implies Udemy Business revenue increases approximately 3% year-over-year, while consumer revenue is expected to be down 9%. On the bottom line, we expect to deliver adjusted EBITDA of $18 million to $20 million or approximately 10% of revenue. For full year 2025 revenue, we expect to be in the range of $784 million to $794 million, representing a slight year-over-year increase at the midpoint. This implies Udemy Business revenue increases approximately 5% year-over-year and consumer revenue will be down approximately 8% year-over-year at the midpoint of the range. On the bottom line, we are raising our full-year adjusted EBITDA range to $84 million to $89 million or approximately 11% of revenue at the midpoint, representing a 600 basis point year-over-year expansion. In closing, we are pleased with the progress we are making in our transformation and are proud of the financial discipline we've demonstrated over the past few years. We've already delivered $50 million in adjusted EBITDA this year, more than we delivered in all of last year. It is important to reiterate that the current growth rate for either segment does not reflect Udemy's true potential. The green shoots we are seeing across the business give us confidence that we are approaching an inflection point in our growth trajectory. The combination of our strong pipeline generation, improving win rates, subscriptions momentum, and AI-driven demand create multiple paths to accelerating growth in the coming quarters. The financial flexibility and operational efficiency we've achieved through disciplined execution now enables us to strategically pivot our focus towards capturing the tremendous growth opportunity ahead of us created by the AI transformation. This will require targeted investments, which we will approach with the same disciplined mindset that got us to this point. We are confident that we can deliver sustainable, profitable growth that will create long-term value for our shareholders, and we're more excited than ever about the path ahead. So with that, we'll open up the call for your questions.

And your first question today will come from Josh Baer with Morgan Stanley.

Congrats on a good quarter. The question is for Hugo. I mean we've seen and we're hearing about some of the actions and initiatives that you've been focused on early on. I was hoping you could kind of summarize some of your key observations from your first four months in the role?

Thank you, Josh. In the last four months, I spent a lot of time with our customers, more than 300 of them. And there are two themes that emerge. And I'm not just talking to L&D leaders. I'm talking to COOs, CEOs, CTOs, CPOs, CDOs, and it is really, really clear that an important shift is happening. The first one, AI reskilling is the topic in every geography. Everybody is trying to figure out what's the right way to reposition their workforce in this AI world. The second is given that there are all these tools, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Devlin, you name it, they're expecting more from their learning partner. They want more than an online catalog. They're wanting more ROI, and they want more AI. And that makes me super, super excited about the pivot that we're doing towards what we are now calling Udemy 2.0. There are three core things here. And I'll just start with a short story that is super illustrative. This is one of the top three pharma companies speaking to the CTO. The meeting starts. He says, 'Hey, my engineers are knee-deep in all these AI tools. They do their work differently. I don't want them to do any learning.' That made for a very awkward beginning of a meeting. Then the more he spoke, the more he explained. He was basically saying, 'I don't want to take my engineers off of working and then going to learn 20 hours of the course to that one day. Maybe if they remember some of the content, they can apply it. I want it to be in the flow of work at the moment they need it with the right context.' He was basically asking for an AI learning partner, a skilled trainer that was powered in a very, very different way. So our Udemy 2.0 has that in state, and I'm very excited about where we're going. First thing is we're expanding the capabilities. We're going beyond content. We're going into assessment, role-play, labs. We're demonstrating mastery with more data and easier to demonstrate ROI. We're also demonstrating recency so that people don't have to learn something at one point and forget it. We're demonstrating constantly that they're still up to date. That's pretty different than a content catalog. The second is we're building a platform, okay? A platform is a technology-intensive endeavor, and it requires different capabilities. You need to integrate more deeply with the tech stack. Most players have a very superficial API integration where you give an LMS, an LXP, or other piece of software, a sense of your content catalog, where we're going way beyond that. In this MCP, I just want to say how excited we've been talking about this with customers one-on-one. And now that the beta is out, it is wild. What is exciting about it is what we're saying is, in an LLM world where people are going to be building their own LLM with their own data, we're going to make the content of our courses, assessment, labs, and role-play available so that they can integrate and personalize the learning experience. That's a very, very different play. We're also going to go deeper and we're going to pull in data, like the employee engagement survey, to say, 'Is there a correlation between the courses you've taken, the skills assessments you've done, the labs you've done and your engagement?' so that we can better guide how the workforce is going to evolve. So again, a platform is a very, very different play. The last thing is this AI. We're going to embed it on the instructor side. We're going to embed it on the learner side. What we really want to do is build this personal skill trainer, somebody that's going to be there as your coach side by side in the flow of work, giving you customized information based on the task that you're trying to accomplish. It's a different world out there, and I couldn't be more excited about how we're pivoting to be relevant in an LLM-centric technology stack.

Excellent. Sarah, I was just wondering, you mentioned coming up against like COVID contracts and renewing, and that's part of what's pressuring UB net dollar retention rates. I was hoping you could unpack that a little bit? So are you seeing logo churn, seat contraction, like other downsells? How much longer do you face these COVID contracts? And is there any kind of saying it's macro-related or budgets are drying up or any element of the changes to your go-to-market or competition?

Yes. Thanks for the question, Josh. Some of these COVID contracts are multiyear deals where, if you'll recall, we shared a few years ago that we had really started pushing multiyear deals in 2021 and 2022. At the time, we didn't have the same implementation capabilities to ensure that those were successful implementations, getting alignment on clear value metrics and having the same sort of executive sponsorship that we have today. When these come up for renewal, without those things in place, we may have a downsell, we may have some logo churn. What we're excited about is, number one, we are working through the final of those that were set up like that because we're now in 2025, and this really was 2021 and 2022 when we were setting it up. But also, we have Neeracha, our new Chief Customer Experience Officer for the first time, who is already making a lot of positive changes. That's everything from outsourcing SMB to BPO to bringing AI play to renewals. Even if it was a COVID contract, we now have these new AI SKUs to help talk about the benefit and ROI of being able to AI-enable your workforce. We're also really aligning our customer success approach to optimize those outcomes for customers. This takes time, but we're happy with the progress. Lots of these renewal conversations start on the enterprise side nine months in advance, but we are working through those, and we expect to be through the rest of those mostly this year. Certainly, there will be some that renewed in '23 on a three-year contract, but we're getting through them.

And your next question today will come from Ryan MacDonald with Needham & Company.

Congrats on a good quarter. Maybe, Sarah, just to sort of start on where we left off on that response. Can you kind of just help us understand how the balancing out of some of these maybe potential headwinds on the renewals, but the sort of level of optimism and positivity you're seeing on pipeline development and growth and how we should sort of triangulate that into what the trajectory of UB looks like as we go into the back half of this year? And sort of how is the macro at play right now, given there is a level of uncertainty on the budgetary side?

Yes, it's a great question. I'm going to let Hugo after I speak talk about what he's seeing from a budget perspective and talking to leaders across the businesses. Let me break it down in two different parts. One is on the ARR side of things and the restructuring that we did in the fourth quarter of last year. We announced it at the end of Q3, restructuring in Q4. Enterprise transformations take time, but we're really through that now. We do have some headwinds from a renewal perspective. What we're seeing is a lot of momentum on the pipeline build, everything from $100,000 deals that are building the pipeline but also that we signed in the last quarter. Bookings are up quarter-over-quarter. Our pipe growth is up year-over-year in NEMAR, APAC, and LatAm. All of these leading indicators from a bookings perspective give us great visibility into a substantial increase in net new ARR in the third quarter, and then we're expecting to have the fourth-quarter net new ARR be similar to what we saw last year. On the retention side, I spoke about what is happening with our Chief Customer Experience Officer, Neeracha, but I also want to share that what Hugo just spoke about, this Udemy 2.0, this is an inherently stickier value prop and product. It is integrated into the full work. It's integrated into the technology stack. It is combining our data with their data to create an even higher ROI and ability to customize and to create a personalized learning experience that is like having a coach at your side. So, putting all these together, that is what leads us to have the confidence in our trajectory and what we're looking at through the back half of this year and into next.

If I can just add a few things on the macro. As I said at the beginning, we're spending a lot of time with the L&D leaders, and they've got their own set of dynamics. We're shifting also to spend a lot more time with the businesses and Udemy 2.0 plays into that. If you're looking into the L&D budget, there are some headwinds where you have less employees. There are a lot of layoffs happening. People are replacing individuals with agents and things like that. So, that's a headwind. There is a bit of uncertainty. But on the positive side, they need to reskill their entire workforce. They're looking for solutions to do that. We feel that on the L&D, it's probably going to net out in a reasonable place, particularly as they go towards consolidation. We feel really, really good because we play both on the technical side and the non-technical side. Now with Udemy 2.0, we have more. Now what's really more exciting from my point of view is our ability to go after budgets that are outside L&D. Our solutions are now going to be way more relevant for those folks. Let me give you one example to bring it to life. Our AI role-play, which is like a massive success this quarter. You can imagine showing up to a sales leader and saying, 'You're onboarding new reps. We have the ability to accelerate the rate of onboarding those reps.' That's of value. That's a different pool of dollars. I had a conversation two weeks ago with one of the largest call center outsourcers. He trains 20,000 people every month. He was like, 'Oh wow, this is a different solution and I can customize that to my need for each of the clients I'm outsourcing to. I want this. Can you kind of give it to me?' I'm saying, 'Well, we're going to roll you through the MCP program, and we're going to do it in a way that is helpful.' The L&D budget is important, and I think they net out. More importantly is as we do the pivot, we're going after new budgets.

Very helpful information there. On the consumer side, it sounds like significant progress is being made with the subscription, but I was particularly interested in the programmatic advertising opportunity and the associated revenue stream you mentioned. Could you elaborate on what you plan to target in that area? How quickly do you expect that revenue stream to grow as we move into the latter half of this year and into the next year?

Great question. I'll start by saying one thing that struck me when I first got here is we had an amazing installed base. We had amazing customers. We had amazing audiences, and we were trying to monetize that in one singular way. We're going to change that. We're going to deploy new ways to monetize our assets. Advertising is one example. It's not the only one. We hinted at a few others, and there will be more coming. But just to stick with the ad, the audience is, let's pick a number, 39 million monthly visitors. Many of them are incredibly interesting visitors. You can have a really fun conversation with advertisers and then you can do different things. You can put an ad before a video rolls, you can put an ad at the end, you can stop, put the ad in the middle, you can do better ads. You can do sponsorship of domains, you can do sponsorship of names, you can do sponsorships of days. All of this is on the table. What we're doing in Q3 is we're doing some experiments to understand how it helps in certain use cases and with certain audiences, with certain content so that we can refine this and push to accelerate this later this year. Expect this to become a more important revenue stream over time, but it is a very exciting example of how we plan on monetizing our assets in the future.

And your next question today will come from Jason Tilchen with Canaccord Genuity.

Hugo, last quarter you mentioned that while the product offering is strong, it might not have been presented in the best way. With the new AI readiness and growth packages, could you elaborate on how existing customers are reacting to these changes and what the potential is for further enhancements and new offerings in enterprise content moving forward? When do you anticipate this will significantly impact revenue per enterprise customer?

Great question. Thank you, Jason. Listen, merchandising on the enterprise and consumer side is a big opportunity. Let me answer directly about the enterprise and the AI SKU. The reception has been overwhelmingly positive. The first case example I gave earlier got initiated in the quarter and closed in the quarter, and it's a very, very, very large deal. We're hitting a really clear need. By merchandising more precisely around AI and AI fluency versus the broad catalog and all these capabilities, we're also making it easier for our sales team to come with a very targeted value proposition. You couldn't have imagined a more excited go-to-market team to now have these tools in their bag. We're also using these tools during renewal as Sarah hinted. The pipeline that has been generating since the beginning of these SKUs represents 25% of our overall pipeline. It is really hitting the mark. We suspect that throughout this year, this is going to be a meaningful part of the way we're going to finish the year. What's exciting is now that we have this muscle that we've demonstrated we can do this. Before that, we had only two SKUs in the enterprise space. We've just doubled it. Imagine as we get a bit more sophisticated, and we start to target different populations, different use cases, different budgets, it's going to be amazing. The same thing on the consumer side. Again, we've done an interesting job with this transactional marketplace. We had the subscription sitting on the side, and now we emphasize subscription. But don't think what we are offering today is what we're going to be offering in the future. First of all, there are multiple subscriptions to be created. That's going to be one version of the merchandising. Second, we're going to evolve what the definition of subscription is. It's not just going to be access to courses. It's going to be access to other services that are natural in the affinity. It could be podcasts, it could be books, it could end up being coaching, it could end up being career counseling. This is an example of what the Indeed thing can do over time, or you can imagine how the subscription value proposition is going to evolve, and that aligns with the point I was making earlier. We've got so many opportunities to monetize what we have that we're going to start to take advantage of that.

And your next question today will come from Yi Fu Lee with Cantor Fitzgerald.

Congrats to a very productive 2Q to the entire Udemy team. A lot of work done. Hugo, I want to double-click, circle back on the product technology differentiation. You mentioned Udemy is highly different than competitors. It sounds like the Udemy 2.0 you are trying to build is more customized, tailored to the individual level. Can you comment on how the new CTO, Ozzie, that brought on with a stellar resume as a founding architect of Dayforce, will bring to the Udemy 2.0 product roadmap? And then I have a quick follow-up with Sarah as well on the financial side.

Thank you, Yi. I mean, it's so central. First of all, we're as the Udemy 2.0 makes it clear, we're going beyond being a marketplace. We're not abandoning the roots of being a marketplace. But as an enterprise software, we needed somebody who has scaled and developed that, and Ozzie is the right person. He's done it with very, very complicated products. He's done it at scale. He's going to help us do things like how do you create the back end to support multiple SKUs, license management, these different monetizations? I hinted at the fact that in an AI world, we're going to need an AI pricing model that may be different than the subscription pricing model. We will need a back end to support that. What I mean by that is we may charge for platform fees. We may charge for consumption. This is different than a catalog, and I'm so excited to have someone who knows how to do this at scale and who's done some very transformative technology shifts. That should cover broadly the question.

Okay. And then flipping over to Sarah on the financial side. It's great to see that it sounds like your commentary is there's going to be a little bit more bottoming in the third quarter of this year. Then we're going to see the inflection in 2026, beginning of 2026. So kind of like right at the end of the tunnel. Firstly, how are we going to get there? Secondly, can you just comment on the COVID-19 cohort from the 2022 and 2021? When will that flush out in terms of timing? That's it for me.

Yes. Thanks for the question. So first, how are we going to get that revenue reacceleration? It's a lot of what we've already talked about, which is how we are monetizing everything from the AI demand we see, which is not just on the UB side, it's also on the consumer side, to driving better retention through operational things from having these AI plays that we can bring into renewals to over time from having an inherently stickier product. I'm going to give you a little stat that can help give you visibility into what is happening as we've moved upmarket. You've heard Hugo say 25% of our pipeline is associated with these AI use cases now. Our large customer new ARR per new logo is up almost 30% quarter-over-quarter. The conversations that we're having are at a higher level. They are talking about broader portions of the team because the use case for AI is across the entire organization. All these early indicators with the pipeline growing across the regions, the bookings growing, and the work we're doing to increase retention, all of those are going to lead to that ARR acceleration.

And your next question today will come from Stephen Sheldon with William Blair.

You have Pat McIlwee on for Stephen today. So, on the UB side of the business, this was the first quarter I can recall seeing your customer count step down sequentially. I just wanted to ask, is that just a natural byproduct of your focus on larger customers with some of those smaller customers rolling off the platform? Or is that more of a factor of these COVID renewals or the broader macro pressures you're seeing in that segment?

Yes. Thanks for the question, Stephen. It really is related to the SMB side of things where we focused and shifted upmarket. We added about 100 new logos and large customers, new net logos in the large customer side of things. What we're excited about is bringing on this BPO to help us out on the SMB side of things. So that's all going in the right direction. We did expect to see some noise from a customer logo count as we shifted our focus upmarket.

Okay. Understood. And then shifting to the consumer side. Can you talk about what you think are the biggest factors driving those green shoots you mentioned in the improvement in your outlook for that business, whether it's strength in demand for AI courses, the early innings of some AI-disrupted workers looking to reskill, or strength internationally?

Thank you for the question. There's a lot of what you said that is part of the reason. So it's multiple factors. The first one I'll highlight is a greater focus on subscription. A lot of our marketing, customer acquisition, and customer journey is now focused on driving subscription. By the way, it does cannibalize a bit of some of the transactional stuff. So there are timing issues that are playing out in our numbers, but we like it. We'll do the trade any day. The LTV of a subscription customer is phenomenal. That is one aspect. It's a bit of a focus in that direction. The second is we are focused in some domain and some category that are more relevant. A lot of them are related to AI or certification prep. There's a lot of demand and a lot of good stuff associated with that. The certification prep space is one where we do have additional monetization opportunities, which will present more clearly in the upcoming quarters. The last is we're optimizing our region. There are some regions where there's more demand right now, and we're obviously switching some of our marketing dollars to those geographies.

And your next question today will come from Jeff Meuler with Baird.

Steven Pawlak on for Jeff. On the win rates, I guess, how is that being measured? Is that reflecting dollars, customers? Is that more tied to new opportunities or the expansion opportunities? And then if you could just sort of quantify how much improvement you're seeing and maybe compare it to 2020, 2021 timeframe?

Yes, I'll take that question. First, it is dollars. We like to look at everything on a weighted basis and how it's impacting our financials overall. These win rates are up on a dollar perspective. It is pretty broad-based, meaning it's happening both on the upsell side and on the new business side. We have a very healthy upsell to new business mix, which we've continued to have. We have seen a bit of an uptick in upsell large-sized deals in our pipeline. Everything is coming together with all the planning that we did in the fourth quarter, the transition that we did of the team, and now we have these AI SKUs, and that's what we're seeing across a broad-based upsell, new business, and it's dollar weighted.

And your next question today will come from Devin Au with KeyBanc.

Just first one quickly. Just, Sarah, could you provide more details on the $2.5 million benefit to consumer revenue in the quarter? What drove that? And why wouldn't it reoccur again? And I have a follow-up.

Yes. Thanks. It really was how we were set up. We were unable to take breakage revenue as it was happening or as we could estimate it. We made some administrative changes, and we were able to pull that through. On a go-forward basis, each quarter we will be able to take that breakage revenue. It just won't be as meaningful because the $2.5 million was sitting on the balance sheet.

Understood. And then just a quick follow-up. Really great to hear about the green shoots, very encouraging. The green shoots that you're seeing, would you mostly contribute that to better execution and having a broader portfolio of products to sell into? Or was there a tone change from customers that now they need to really focus on reskilling the workforce? Just any additional color would be helpful.

Yes. First and foremost, I do think the team has continued to improve its execution and its focus, and it's the strategy that's playing out. The mixture of what we're doing on the go-to-market and the focus, it is the additional product and the way to monetize. It also just expanding the kind of conversation rather than being constrained to the L&D, going more broad. It does have some counter effect, by the way. It does elongate some deal conversations that you can't close in the quarter. But again, if you're able to close bigger and longer and more strategic and you've got better alignment on the outcomes, you're going to be better positioned for renewal. We're doing all of that, and that's kind of giving us that degree of confidence. The second piece is back to what I said at the very beginning; they're asking about AI fluency now. The fact that we've pivoted to make that the story and the approach resonates. I was a bit nervous if it was an American or a North American thing. I've been in each geography. It's worldwide. It has a bit of different flavor in Europe and etc., but everybody is trying to figure out what to do given this. The other piece, is part around being positioned not as a content provider, but as a more technology heavy, using AI ourselves. I think it resonates too because they're doing that across their whole technology stack. They're seeing their lawyers using AI tools like Harvey to do things. The marketing folks are using AI tools. They're kind of turning to their content provider and like, 'What's going on?' Like do you need something to kind of match that? We have a good answer. We're pretty excited about where we're positioned in the market. We're very different than others. We think we're where the buck is going because this LLM and this transition to AI and agents and all that is going to be pretty broad, pretty comprehensive, and we're kind of a leader.

Your next question today will come from Nafeesa Gupta with Bank of America.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

My first question is about consumer behavior. You mentioned some positive signs, and it seems like the North American business is performing better than expected last quarter. Would you consider this an inflection in consumer behavior due to the stronger subscription numbers you're seeing, or is it merely a continuation of the existing trends on the macro front, Hugo?

We are currently undergoing a fundamental shift in our consumer strategy. This change is driving our focus towards a new value proposition and a different set of products aimed at various audiences. Our messaging is also evolving. Over time, we expect to reduce our reliance on discounts, which we've historically depended on. This shift is deliberate, and we need to proceed cautiously since we have established consumer habits and past positioning of our product that we are looking to alter. We believe we have the resources to implement these changes thoughtfully. Additionally, we need to be mindful that the timing for transactional and subscription models does not align perfectly, and capital markets evaluate our performance quarterly. We are proceeding with care. By the end of the year, we anticipate that 20% of our Gross Merchandise Value will come from subscriptions, marking a significant transition. Looking ahead to next year, we have exciting opportunities to broaden our definition of subscriptions and tailor them to appeal to diverse audiences. Our excitement stems from recognizing and responding to existing demand rather than merely seeking it out.

And one more from me for Sarah. Sarah, we've seen quite a lot of leverage on the sales and marketing front. How do we think of that going ahead? Anything that you're doing in that space to see that leverage? Which areas are you focusing on now in terms of UB versus consumer?

Yes, it's a great question. First, the shift to upmarket is driving some of the leverage we're seeing. That's on the Udemy Business side of things. There is more leverage to be gained from being able to sell more into the same customers and being able to retain those customers longer. On the Consumer side, as Hugo mentioned, the LTV of the subscription is significantly higher than that of the transactional business. There's more we can do from a marketing perspective and from an owned channels perspective to drive the top line, but also that shift to GMV and revenue coming from consumer subscriptions will give us more leverage. So we've got lots of levers on both sides from a sales and marketing perspective. We started pulling them last year, but we're going to continue pulling them.

I'll just add one more thing to Sarah's answer that both on the enterprise sale side and on the consumer, our increasing use of partners is going to give us a very, very different leverage, very, very different leverage. We are going to start to look a lot more like a classic enterprise software company on the UB side, and we're going to use these partners to help co-sell and support lead generation. On the consumer, I mean, Indeed is just one example. It's a customer acquisition channel that has a very, very different CAC, very, very different value proposition. It is converting very differently, incredibly well. We're so excited because, again, we're getting the consumer at a moment when they need something. They're in a career transition, and we're giving them value immediately. If we can continue to demonstrate value, then we can retain them for the long run. That also will give us leverage in the sales and marketing model.

This will conclude our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Hugo Sarrazin for any closing remarks.

Thank you for joining, and I look forward to connecting again in October for our Q3 call.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.