Udacity

Udacity is an online school for technology skills. It sells programs it calls nanodegrees in subjects such as programming, data science, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, mostly to working adults and to employers training their staff. Since 2024 it has been part of Accenture, the global consulting firm.

It started with a Stanford class. In the fall of 2011 Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig taught Introduction to Artificial Intelligence free online. Enrollment reportedly reached about 160,000. Thrun decided teaching at that scale mattered more than his campus job and left to build a company. This profile uses Stanford Engineering's 2011 announcement, Accenture's releases and reputable reporting.

Sebastian Thrun at Stanford

Thrun was already one of Stanford's best known computer scientists. He led the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory when it reopened in 2004. In 2005 his team's driverless car, Stanley, won the DARPA Grand Challenge, a desert race for robot vehicles. That work fed directly into the self-driving car industry. Our page on Stanford and the history of AI covers SAIL and the revival of AI research on campus.

Thrun also worked at Google in those years, where he helped start its self-driving car project and its research lab known as Google X. That mix of university research and company work is common at Stanford, where faculty often hold outside roles. It also explains why a professor could move so quickly from a free class to a funded startup.

By 2011 Stanford Engineering described Thrun as a Stanford Research Professor of Computer Science and a Google Fellow. Norvig, his co-teacher, was Google's director of research and co-author of the field's best known textbook.

The 2011 AI class

On August 15, 2011, Stanford Engineering announced three free online computer science courses for the fall: Machine Learning with Andrew Ng, Introduction to Databases with Jennifer Widom and Introduction to Artificial Intelligence with Thrun and Norvig. Classes ran from October 10 through December, offered with the Stanford Center for Professional Development.

Interest in the AI course was enormous from the start. Stanford said more than 58,000 people had already signed up their interest when it announced the classes. Final enrollment was reported at about 160,000 from around the world. The Machine Learning course led its teacher, Andrew Ng, to co-found Coursera with Daphne Koller. Two of the biggest names in online education therefore came out of the same Stanford semester.

Founding Udacity

Thrun founded Udacity with David Stavens and Mike Sokolsky. Wikipedia, citing Fast Company, dates the founding to June 2011, before the Stanford class began. It was announced publicly at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich in January 2012. Thrun said the name came from wanting to be "audacious for you, the student."

Early money came from Charles River Ventures and about $200,000 of Thrun's own funds. In October 2012 Andreessen Horowitz, the Menlo Park firm, led a further $15 million investment.

The first two Udacity courses started on February 20, 2012:

• CS 101: Building a Search Engine, taught by David Evans of the University of Virginia.
• CS 373: Programming a Robotic Car, taught by Thrun himself.

Both used the Python language. Four more courses began in April 2012, with teachers including Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman and Norvig. Later that year Thrun's original AI class was relaunched on Udacity as CS 271.

Experiments with college credit

Udacity tried to work directly with universities, with mixed results. On January 15, 2013, it announced a pilot with San Jose State University for credit-bearing online courses in algebra and statistics. Pass rates in the first round were lower than in the regular classroom versions. A summer round did better in several courses, but the partnership was suspended on July 18, 2013.

A longer-lasting experiment came with the Georgia Institute of Technology. In 2014 Georgia Tech launched an online master's degree in computer science in partnership with Udacity and AT&T, at a far lower price than a campus degree.

The pivot to nanodegrees

In November 2013 Thrun told Fast Company that Udacity had "a lousy product" for the general public and that the company would refocus on vocational training. The new model was the nanodegree, first announced with AT&T in June 2014. AT&T said it would offer paid internships to some graduates. The goal was to teach the skills needed for an entry-level technology job rather than to copy a university course.

Corporate partners shaped many of the programs. Udacity worked with Google, Nvidia, Microsoft and others on specialized courses. It also ran large scholarship programs with Google for web and Android developers in 2017. By early 2022 it listed 78 nanodegrees. In February 2018 Reuters reported that Udacity had raised $163 million and was valued at more than $1 billion.

Accenture takes over

Accenture announced its plan to buy Udacity on March 5, 2024. It completed the purchase on May 20, 2024, in a release datelined New York and Mountain View. Accenture said Udacity had served more than 21 million registered learners in 195 countries and that the deal added more than 230 people to LearnVantage, its business for training clients' workforces. It did not disclose the price.

Udacity's place in the local story

Udacity is a Stanford story more than a Palo Alto one. We could not confirm a Palo Alto office in the sources we checked. What ties it here is a single course, taught from Stanford by one of its best known professors, that showed how many people wanted to learn computer science online.

The company's early courses also carried a recognizable Stanford flavor. The robotic car class drew on the same research that produced Stanley. The search engine class taught the kind of indexing that Google, another Stanford project, had turned into a giant business. For a few years, a learner anywhere could study material shaped by the same labs that line Stanford's engineering quad.

Udacity and Coursera took different lessons from the same semester. Coursera partnered with universities and kept their brands front and center. Udacity built its own programs with companies and aimed at jobs. Both found that free courses alone did not make a business. For more on how Stanford turns classes and research into companies, see our guide to Stanford entrepreneurship programs.

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