Udemy has had its fourth leadership send-off this year. Chief Marketing Officer Genefa Murphy has resigned 2.5 years into her tenure to pursue other opportunities.

This is after

• CEO Greg Brown’s exit in March 2025 after serving just two years
• CTO Eren Bali’s replacement in June 2025
• CPO Prasad Raje’s transition out of his role (started October 2024 and ended in March 2025)

Now it’s CMO Murphy.

She was hired in July 2023, when Udemy’s Enterprise revenue was more than half of the total revenue, as Class Central reported. But the growth had started to stall. Consumer revenue was declining, and Enterprise revenue’s year-on-year growth kept declining after the pandemic boost.

In 2023 Q1, Consumer revenue decreased by 7%, and Enterprise revenue showed a 47% year-on-year growth (it grew ~75% in 2022 Q1). After that, Consumer revenue continued to remain flat or decline. In 2025, CFO Sarah Blanchard said it will decrease by 9%.

Murphy was responsible for “accelerating global brand-building initiatives and further elevating Udemy’s position as a next-generation skills development and acquisition platform.”

To build and sustain growth, Udemy had been spending a lot on marketing. In 2023, it spent around $317 million on sales and marketing (~60% of the total operating expenses). In 2024, it was $343 million — 8% more. It was the company’s highest expense in both years. Still, Consumer revenue fell 5% in 2024.

Enterprise continued to grow in 2024. It earned $421 million in 2023 and grew to $495 million in 2024. But increasing Enterprise customers wasn’t purely a marketing game.

In its 2024 10-K filing, the company said, “Historically, we have expanded from individual to team to multi-department and company-wide sales as Udemy Business’s value is proven and customers identify additional use cases.”

This means that once Udemy signs one department in a company, it would possibly onboard other departments from the same company. And it could be the reason why Enterprise revenue is growing at a higher volume than the number of Enterprise customers.

But Enterprise’s growth is declining. The company’s 2025 Enterprise revenue is projected to be $510 – $520 million, just a ~6% increase after 2024 revenue increased by 18%.

I also checked Udemy’s Net Dollar Retention Rate (NDRR), which shows how much existing Enterprise customers spend year-over-year. When NDRR is above 100%, it means existing customers are spending more than the previous year.

The same customers were paying more every year until Q1 2025 (which also explains more growth in revenue compared to Enterprise customers). But now, they’re paying less.

In their recent earnings call, Udemy said they’re reaching the “tail end” of these COVID-era renewals. But they had signed these deals during the “pandemic boost.” To get all of them renewed might be difficult today.

They also signed a bunch of clients in a short period, so their renewals are clustered together instead of being spread out. A failure to renew them would cause a big dip in revenues (or much slower growth).

While discussing my findings with our founder, Dhawal Shah, he asked me to go through Udemy’s Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) — the total annualized value of all active subscription/contract revenue. That is decelerating too.

This means that despite increasing spending on marketing, both Consumer (on face value) and Enterprise performance (beneath the revenue numbers) seem to be flailing.

This was Murphy’s third CMO role. Before Udemy, she served as the CMO at Micro Focus, one of the largest software companies in the world, and Five9, a cloud contact center software provider.

Until the company finds a new marketing executive, Head of Content, Instructor & Creator Strategy Zane Vella will be in charge.

Zane was the CEO of Sessions College, an online digital media and design school, and has been the VP of product and technology, and VP of audience development and innovation at Comcast. He also founded Watchwith, an interactive video platform acquired by Comcast.

To deal with the revenue decline, Udemy has made instructor cuts, increased subscription sales over marketplace sales, and even introduced ads to the platform, but the stock price is still 80% less than the IPO price. Now it’s the fourth leadership exit within a year.