Startup Spotlight: Online Education for You, by You

For some, online education fulfills pragmatic goals such as cramming GRE vocabulary. For others—striving to master Thai cooking or calligraphy of the Ottoman Empire—it’s more about pursuing a hobby. 

Whatever the aim, Udemy seeks to fulfill it.

Founded in Mountain View in May 2010, Udemy offers a growing collection of 3,500 mostly free classes on anything its users—who both take and create their own courses—can imagine.   

Short for “Academy of You,” the website is all about letting people teach and study any time they want. Instructors decide the format on the course whether by video, PowerPoint presentations, articles or “live sessions” with an online chat. The website also archives lectures from major universities such as UCLA and from public figures like Mark Zuckerberg.

“Education is slowly going to move online,” said Gagan Biyani, 23, co-founder of Udemy. “That’s where the best education in the world will be.”

Udemy joins the ranks of similar teach-and-be-taught sites such as Learnable—where instructors charge for all of their courses—or the all-academic Sophia.

Last month, it was one of 30 companies selected for the Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator showcase at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, TX. More than 400 start-ups applied from around the country for the coveted spot.

The small start-up—which recently relocated to San Francisco—boasts six employees with an expansion to nine in the next month. Biyani co-founded Udemy with Oktay Caglar and Eren Bali, the creators of Knowband.com. Founded in 2007 in their native Turkey, the site operated in a similar manner and educated Turkish entrepreneurs in a live classroom setting through presentations by other Europeans.

In addition to its founders’ expertise, Biyani thinks Udemy will benefit from the growing usefulness of the Internet. In the past, people were less likely to spend lots of time sifting through the 'net, according to Biyani. Now they can use it for other aspects of life, whether to make calls, watch videos or listen to the radio.

Like many user-driven sites, there's no top-down process to monitor Udemy courses, which are usually taught as part of a series, Biyani explained. Rather, users rank what courses they recommend, naturally filtering the most useful material. “The Web will resurface the best content,” he said.

Instructors can charge for their courses or offer them completely free. Still, said Biyani, more than 90 percent of Udemy courses are free, and he expects that number to hover over 80 percent in the future.

Angela Poch joined the site to offer a course on “Becoming Vegetarian.” She'd already created cooking videos for her remote “Vegan Vegetarian Cooking School,” and was able to reach a broader audience—with more helpful tools—through Udemy. 

“Udemy offers me a lot of flexibility and individual care,” said Poch, who plans to offer future courses through the site. “I can email directly a real person for real help.”

The company recent raised $1 million, in part, through Dave McClure’s Mountain View-based 500 Startups Fund. Other funding has come from Mark Sugarman’s MHS Capital, and other local venture capitalists, such as Rick Thompson and Jeremy Stoppelman.

Now that the company has started to make a profit, the biggest challenges of the site remain “attracting the best people in the world" as educators, said Biyani.

“We’re going to continue to expand and improve the user experience.”