Seven years after replacing a Yale president with a fintech CEO, Coursera picks an Amazon veteran to help fix its slowing growth and falling stock price.

The $34.5M price tag for Duolingo’s NextBeat acqui-hire came to light after Class Central dug through its quarterly SEC report.

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

Both Coursera and Udemy started 2025 with new CEOs. Greg Hart took over at Coursera in February. Hugo Sarrazin started at Udemy in March. Less than a month into the job, both CEOs were in conversations to sell their companies. On April 8, Hart and Sarrazin met for the first time at ASU+GSV. The rest, as they say, is history. In my 5,000-word analysis of Coursera’s acquisition of Udemy, I called the deal rushed. Two new CEOs, both less than a year into the job, merging two public companies. I w