COURSERA, INC. (COUR) — Fundamental Analysis

Coursera is a growing online education platform that has expanded revenue at a solid clip — roughly 13% annually over the past three years and over 20% annually over five — but it has yet to turn a profit. The good news is that losses are narrowing meaningfully: operating and net margins have improved dramatically since the depths of 2021–2022, and gross margins have crept upward, suggesting the underlying unit economics are getting healthier. The company carries no debt and maintains a reasonable cash cushion, and its capital spending is remarkably light, which is typical of a software-driven business. The concern is that the most recent quarter (ending June 2026) shows a sharp swing back toward wider losses compared to the full-year 2025 trend, raising questions about whether the path to profitability is as straight as the annual data implied. In plain terms: Coursera is a capital-light, revenue-growing business moving in the right direction on profitability, but it isn't there yet and recent quarterly results are a step backward worth watching.

Snapshot & Big Picture

Coursera went public in 2021 and operates a marketplace connecting learners with university and corporate partners offering online courses, certificates, and degrees. Revenue has grown every single year on record — from $184 million in 2019 to $757 million in fiscal year 2025 — while the business has remained unprofitable throughout. The consistent theme is one of a company investing heavily in growth while gradually tightening the belt on losses. EBITDA losses peaked at around $159 million in 2022 and have shrunk to roughly $49 million by 2025, a substantial improvement even as revenue kept climbing. Gross margins, which reflect how efficiently Coursera delivers its content relative to revenue, have generally trended upward from the low-50% range toward the mid-50s, with the most recent quarter reaching nearly 58%. The absence of any debt on the balance sheet is a genuine positive — the company is not leveraged, and its current ratio (a measure of short-term financial cushion) has remained comfortably above 2x for most of its history.

Latest Quarter Snapshot

The most recent quarterly filing covers the period ending June 30, 2026, and is more current than the annual figures above. On the surface, revenue of $298.6 million looks healthy — that's a strong quarterly number relative to the $757 million full-year 2025 figure. Gross margin also improved to 58.1%, the best level in the data series, which suggests Coursera's content delivery and partner economics continue to improve. However, the profitability picture in this quarter is notably worse than the annual 2025 trend implied. The operating margin widened to -28.4% and the net margin to -26.9%, representing a sharp deterioration versus the -10.2% and -6.7% seen in full-year 2025. EBITDA came in at -$77.2 million for just this one quarter — already exceeding the entire full-year 2025 EBITDA loss of -$48.6 million. The current ratio also contracted to 1.59, down meaningfully from 2.54 at year-end 2024 and 2.51 at year-end 2025, indicating that near-term liquidity has tightened. Capital expenditures in the quarter were just $200,000 (capex-to-revenue of 0.07%), continuing the pattern of extremely light physical investment.

Profitability

The multi-year trend on profitability is one of meaningful improvement with an important caveat. Losses as a share of revenue were genuinely enormous in 2021 and 2022 — net margins of -35% and -33.5% respectively — driven by heavy post-IPO spending on sales, marketing, and technology. From 2023 onward, Coursera has consistently narrowed those losses each year: net margin improved from -18.3% (2023) to -11.4% (2024) to -6.7% (2025). That is a real and encouraging trajectory. Gross margin, after a curious dip in 2023 from the 60%+ levels of 2021–2022 back to the low 50s, has been recovering modestly, reaching 54.6% in 2025 and 58.1% in the most recent quarter. The worry, as noted above, is that the Q2 2026 data disrupts the improving annual trend with significantly wider quarterly losses. Whether this reflects seasonality, one-time costs, or a genuine reversal remains to be seen in subsequent filings.

Financial Health

Coursera carries no long-term debt — the debt-to-equity ratio was not reported (effectively not applicable or zero) across all periods in the filings. This is a meaningful strength for a company that is still burning cash; it does not face interest burdens or refinancing risk. The current ratio — comparing short-term assets to short-term liabilities — has been comfortably above 2x for most of the company's public life, though it has trended downward from a peak of 4.4x in 2021 to 2.54x at end of 2024, 2.51x at end of 2025, and 1.59x in the most recent quarter. That declining trend bears watching, as continued cash consumption without profitability will eventually pressure liquidity further.

Capital expenditures are strikingly low throughout the entire history, which is characteristic of a software and content-marketplace business that does not need to build factories or own heavy infrastructure. Annual capex ranged from $1.1 million to $4.4 million across the years covered, and capex as a share of revenue has consistently been below 0.4% in recent years — falling from about 1.1% in 2020 to just 0.2% in 2025. In the most recent quarter, capex was only $200,000 (0.07% of revenue). This low capital intensity is a structural advantage: Coursera can grow without needing to reinvest large sums in physical assets, meaning cash consumption is driven almost entirely by operating expenses like headcount and marketing rather than by asset-heavy investment programs.

Growth

The table below shows Coursera's trailing revenue CAGR over available multi-year windows. The ten-year window is not available because the company does not have ten years of SEC filing history — Coursera's IPO was in March 2021, and its earliest 10-K data in the filings only extends to fiscal year 2019, which is insufficient to calculate a ten-year compound growth rate.

The five-year CAGR of ~20.9% reflects a period that includes the COVID-era surge in online learning demand, which meaningfully boosted 2020–2021 growth rates. The more recent three-year CAGR of ~13.1% is a better approximation of Coursera's current-era growth pace — still healthy for a business at this scale, but representing a clear deceleration as the post-pandemic tailwind fades and the company's revenue base grows larger. Sustaining double-digit growth while simultaneously closing in on operating breakeven will be the central challenge for the business going forward.

Source Filings

• 10-Q filed 2026-08-05 (period ending June 30, 2026)
• 10-Q filed 2026-04-30 (period ending March 31, 2026)