Chegg

Founding and early growth

Chegg originated as Cheggpost, a Craigslist-style message board for Iowa State University students launched in October 2000 by Josh Carlson, Mike Seager, and Mark Fiddleke.^[1][2] Carlson teamed with Osman Rashid, an avid user of the site who recognized its potential to disrupt the textbook market,^[3] and together with Aayush Phumbhra they incorporated the company in 2005, initially offering scholarship searches, internship matching, and college application advice.^[4][5] That same year, the founders purchased 2,000 textbooks and launched Textbookflix.com, a rental service modeled on Netflix.^[6][7]

After Carlson's departure in February 2006, Phumbhra and Rashid rebranded the service, launching it as Chegg in December 2007 with Rashid as CEO.^{[5][8][9][10]} The name Chegg is a combination of the words chicken and egg, and references the founders' catch-22 feeling of being unable to obtain a job without experience, while being unable to acquire experience without a job.^[8]

Growth was rapid: revenues exceeded $10 million in 2008, and the company surpassed that figure in January 2009 alone.^[8] That June, former Ask.com and Match.com CEO Jim Safka replaced Rashid as CEO,^[11] and in November 2009 the company raised $57 million in a financing round led by Insight Venture Partners.^[12][13]

Expansion and IPO

Dan Rosensweig, formerly CEO of Guitar Hero, took over as CEO in February 2010 and began shifting Chegg from a textbook rental business toward a broader digital learning platform.^[14][15][16] Under his leadership, Chegg added course selection and homework help features in 2011,^[17] raised an additional $25 million from 17 investors in 2012,^[18] and pursued an aggressive series of acquisitions (see below).

In November 2013, Chegg went public on the New York Stock Exchange at $12.50 per share, raising $187.5 million and achieving a valuation of $1.1 billion.^[19][20][21] The following year, Chegg partnered with Ingram Content Group to handle its physical textbook distribution, allowing the company to focus on digital services.^[22][23]

In April 2017, Chegg and Pearson Education entered a partnership whereby Pearson made 50 textbooks available exclusively for rent on Chegg.^[24][25] The relationship soured, however, and after the partnership ended in May 2021, Pearson sued Chegg for copyright infringement, alleging that Chegg had profited from selling answers to end-of-chapter questions in Pearson textbooks.^[26]

AI disruption and restructuring

In June 2021, Chegg launched Uversity, a platform for professors and educators to share content.^[27] The company's core business, however, came under severe pressure from generative artificial intelligence. In May 2023, Chegg acknowledged that ChatGPT had become a serious competitor, and its stock fell 38% in a single day; the company responded by announcing Cheggmate, its own AI-powered platform.^[28][29]

Rosensweig stepped down as CEO in June 2024 after 14 years, becoming executive chairman, and was succeeded by longtime Chegg executive Nathan Schultz.^[30] The transition did not arrest the company's decline. By late 2024 Chegg was steadily losing subscribers,^[31][32] and in February 2025 the company sued Google, alleging that its AI Overviews feature diverted traffic away from Chegg's website.^[33][34]

Two rounds of layoffs followed. In May 2025, Chegg cut approximately 248 employees, or 22% of its workforce.^[35] In October 2025, after a year-long strategic review conducted with Goldman Sachs that considered a sale and a go-private transaction, the board concluded that Chegg would remain a standalone public company.^[36] Alongside that announcement, Chegg laid off a further 388 employees (45% of the remaining workforce) and pivoted toward enterprise skilling and language learning through its Busuu and Chegg Skills divisions, which were expected to generate approximately $70 million in revenue in 2025.^[36][37] Rosensweig returned as CEO, replacing Schultz, who became an executive adviser.^[36]

Acquisitions

Chegg acquisitions include:

• CourseRank (August 2010), a website for rating and reviewing courses, disabled in 2014.^[38]
• Cramster.com (December 2010), a provider of online homework help.^[39]
• Notehall (July 2011), an online marketplace for class notes.^[40]
• Zinch (September 2011), a scholarship search service for high school students and college recruiters.^[41]
• 3D3R (November 2011), software company, to develop its digital textbook product, kickstart its mobile product group, and open an engineering office in Rehovot, Israel.^[42][43]
• InstaEDU (June 2014), an online tutoring platform obtained for $30 million, which was renamed Chegg Tutors.^[44][38][45]
• Internships.com (October 2014), for $11 million.^[46][47]
• Imagine Easy Solutions (May 2016), a provider of online bibliography and research tools, for $42 million.^[48]
• RefME (February 2017), a free citation management tool available on web, iOS and Android. It was shut down on March 7, 2017, and user accounts were transferred over to CiteThisForMe.^[49]
• Cogeon GmbH (October 2017), a German mathematics education provider, for €12.5 million in cash.^[4][50]
• WriteLab (May 2018), which uses artificial intelligence to analyze text and suggest improvements, for $15 million.^[51][52]
• StudyBlue (July 2018), an online flashcard tool, for $20.8 million.^[53][54]
• Thinkful (September 2019), an online coding, design, and data science school for $80 million cash, plus $20 million in cash or stock based on performance.^[55][56]
• Busuu (November 2021), a computer-assisted language learning service, for $436 million in cash.^[57][58][59]

Academic misconduct

Chegg has been accused of copyright infringement and facilitating academic dishonesty through its "homework help" service, in which paid "Chegg experts" solve homework questions submitted by students.^[60][61][62] Students also use the platform for file-sharing, posting homework question sheets and soliciting answers.^[63] A 2020 study found that Chegg answered questions even when they contained clear indicators that the student was attempting to cheat.^[64] Some universities explicitly forbid students from using the service,^[65][66] and some professors have posted fake answers on Chegg to identify students who cheat.^[67]

In February 2019, Chegg partnered with the Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University to make writing tools more accessible to students.^[68] The partnership drew faculty criticism for legitimizing a platform associated with cheating,^[60] though Purdue's guidelines explicitly prohibited using Chegg for that purpose.^[69]

The issue intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic, as students taking exams on personal computers faced no technical barriers to accessing Chegg simultaneously.^[62][70] Cheating incidents were reported at Georgia Tech,^[70] Boston University,^[71] the University of British Columbia,^[72] and Washington University in St. Louis, where solutions to a physics exam were posted on Chegg during the exam period.^[73] Chegg cooperated with the universities' investigations.^[70][71][73] There have also been cases of students being blackmailed by the Chegg employees who provided them with answers.^[74][75]

In August 2022, Chegg changed its "honor code policy" to limit the information it shared with universities about student activity, saying the change was to protect student privacy.^[76] Chegg was cited as an example of a cheating service in the United Kingdom's proposed Higher Education Cheating Services Prohibition Bill,^[77] and in October 2024, Australia's Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency sued Chegg for allegedly violating Australian laws against cheating services.^[78] A 2022 shareholder lawsuit accused the company of misleading investors, claiming that Chegg's growth was "largely due to the facilitation of cheating-an unstable business proposition-rather than the strength of its business model or the acumen of its senior executives and directors".^[79]

Data breaches

In September 2018, Chegg disclosed that a data breach the previous April had potentially exposed the user names, passwords, email addresses, and shipping addresses of 40 million users; social security numbers and bank account information were not affected.^[80][81] The Federal Trade Commission subsequently investigated and in January 2023 finalized an order requiring the company to implement comprehensive security controls, enable consumer data access, and minimize data collection.^[82][83]