Imagine a village school where five different grades study in a single room with one teacher. What if that teacher is your mother, and while she attends to the other grades, you have to teach yourself from books? That was exactly Eren Bali's childhood. And that one-room classroom would become the starting point of a journey to a platform where nearly 80 million people take courses.
He was born in 1984 in Durulova, an apricot village in Malatya. Resources were limited; but a second-hand computer that entered the house and a weak dial-up internet connection changed everything. Bali taught himself advanced mathematics from internet forums. He had no teacher, no coach, no plan—only curiosity. This curiosity first took him to a gold medal at the national mathematics olympiad, then to a silver medal at the 2001 International Mathematical Olympiad.
A repeatedly rejected idea: Udemy
After completing a double major in computer engineering and mathematics at METU, he went to Silicon Valley. With the idea of equalizing access to education for everyone, he founded Udemy in 2010 together with Oktay Çağlar and Gagan Biyani. The path was not smooth; his idea was repeatedly rejected. But with the support of angel investors like Naval Ravikant and Keith Rabois, the platform launched. Today, Udemy reaches over 79 million students with more than 180,000 courses. The company went public on Nasdaq in 2021; in December 2025, it was acquired by Coursera for approximately $930 million.
Turning points
• He studied in a one-room school in an apricot village in Malatya.
• He taught himself mathematics with a second-hand computer.
• He won a silver medal at the 2001 International Mathematical Olympiad.
• He founded Udemy in Silicon Valley in 2010.
• He founded the health startup Carbon Health in 2015 (valued at $3.3 billion at its peak).
• In 2025, he started from scratch again by founding the artificial intelligence company Monogram.
Second billion dollars: Carbon Health
Bali's story did not end with a single success. In 2014, when he went to Turkey for his mother's health issue, he saw that doctors were struggling with old technologies and that the system centered on something other than the patient. This observation became the seed of Carbon Health, which he founded in 2015. The company built an affordable and accessible healthcare model; its value reached $3.3 billion in 2021. Bali started from scratch once again in 2025 and founded the artificial intelligence company Monogram.
"The internet may not fully equalize education, but it gives people a chance to close the gap." This is how Bali explains why he founded Udemy.
The child who discovered a world on the screen of that second-hand computer in his village has become the man who opens the same discovery opportunity to millions today. Eren Bali's story is proof that it is not your starting point but your curiosity that defines your limits.
