The Man Who Co-Founded Udemy Just Handed Over Maven. Eight of Every Ten Dollars It Sells Now Come From One Topic.

Gagan Biyani spent six years building a marketplace for live online courses. In September he handed over the keys and went to go start a school.

After six years building Maven as its CEO, Biyani transitioned to Chairman of Maven's Board in September 2026, with Rishin Banker taking over as CEO. On LinkedIn, Biyani kept it short: "Congratulations to Maven's new CEO, Rishin Banker!" he wrote, saying he'd transition to Chairman of the Board and "be exploring for awhile," and calling Rishin "an obvious choice as CEO."

The exploring did not take long. The Horowitz Andreessen Academy, a new San Francisco school founded by Biyani, raised $42 million with Andreessen Horowitz leading and Marc Andreessen and general partner Erik Torenberg joining him on the board.

So the founder is gone. What he left behind is one of the only honest datasets anyone has on what live, high-ticket teaching actually pays.

The $100M headline, and the math underneath it

In September 2026, Banker announced he was becoming CEO, with Biyani moving to chairman, and reported more than $100 million in instructor sales and over 100,000 student alumni.

That's the number that got screenshotted. Here's the one that didn't: Biyani said that 150 practitioners had earned more than $100,000 on Maven and that 15 had surpassed $1 million in earnings.

Run the floor. Fifteen people at a minimum of $1 million each, plus 135 more at a minimum of $100,000 each, is at least $28.5 million. That's more than a quarter of the platform's lifetime course sales sitting with 150 names — and that's the conservative version, because nobody in the $1M club stopped at exactly $1 million.

The top of this marketplace is a very short list.

It is also a growing one, which matters more than the concentration. In 2023 Biyani posted that 30 instructors had earned over $100,000 on Maven, that instructors averaged $12,000 per cohort, and that almost none had full-time employees. Thirty to 150 in roughly three years is a five-fold expansion of the six-figure club. Slow, real, unsexy growth.

One more caveat worth keeping in your head every time a platform waves a GMV number at you: course sales are marketplace volume, not Maven's own revenue. Maven's take is a 10% fee on a professional's revenue — the Substack model. A $100 million lifetime marketplace is roughly a $10 million lifetime platform, gross.

Eight dollars in ten

Then the line that should reorganize how course creators think about 2027. Banker said AI represented 80% of sales, and named Notion, Lattice, and Salesforce among employer pilots.

Look at the storefront and it's not a surprise. Maven's trending list runs through AI evals for engineers and PMs, agentic AI certifications, AI product management bootcamps and AI engineering courses built around Claude Code, RAG and MCP.

A marketplace that launched selling how to become an influencer and how to trade crypto — a16z's own announcement listed exactly those topics among the early courses — now sells one thing, to people whose employers are nervous.

If you teach anything else, that's the competitive landscape you're pricing against. The oxygen on live-cohort platforms is going to one category.

The part nobody puts on a landing page

Maven's most useful disclosure is three years old and almost never quoted. The average course gets 20% of its sales through the Maven marketplace.

Eighty percent of the seats come from the instructor. Your list, your LinkedIn, your reputation, your DMs. The platform is a checkout, a classroom and a discovery bonus. It is not a sales team.

This is the same lesson the company learned the expensive way. Eighteen months in, after students had completed over 300 cohorts and the platform had reached $9 million in course sales, Maven pivoted away from creators toward experts. Co-founder Wes Kao told TechCrunch at the time that the hypothesis that a creator with a big audience will have a great course and be able to fill it "was wrong," and that smaller subject-matter experts without big audiences were doing really well on the platform.

Follower count was never the asset. Willingness to do the unglamorous work of filling a room was.

The pivot came at a cost. Maven retargeted experienced practitioners and began helping them find learners; Biyani reported instructor revenue retention rising from 73% to 120-140%, and the change cost Maven much of its original course-sales base. Those are founder-reported figures, and they are not student completion rates.

The new guy is a marketplace operator, not a personality

"I joined Maven almost 5 years ago," Banker wrote in his own announcement. Combined with a prior stint at Teachers Pay Teachers, he said, he has spent the last decade building education marketplaces — not the traditional path for someone who started as an investment banking analyst. He also said he is "unusually excited by incentivizing and scaling great teaching."

He described a team of 20. The company has raised $25.8 million across five rounds. Twenty people, $26 million raised, $100 million moved through the platform, 80% of it AI.

That's not a creator-economy company anymore. That's a corporate training business with a marketplace front door, run by someone who has spent ten years thinking about teacher incentives rather than funnel hacks.

For anyone selling knowledge: the ceiling on live cohorts is real and it is seven figures. The number of people who have touched it is 15.