Thinkific, the creator of a cloud platform for making and selling digital learning courses, made significant strides towards profitability in the past year, revealing in its fourth-quarter (Q4) earnings that it posted a net loss of just $200,000 in 2024, compared to $9.8 million the year before.
The Vancouver-based company generated a positive cash flow from operations last year, and its overall cash flow grew to $7 million, compared to a $5.4-million loss in 2023. The firm held $49.5 million in cash and equivalents as of the end of 2024.
Thinkific also launched multiple AI-driven features in the last three months of 2024.
CEO Greg Smith claimed the success came as the company transitioned away from cost-saving measures to growth investment, calling 2024 a “pivotal year.” Thinkific’s commerce revenue jumped 73 percent year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2024, to $3.1 million, while the Thinkific Plus customer education service grew 27 percent to $4.3 million.
The company warned that it still faced trouble ahead. CFO Corinne Hua said Thinkific was “experiencing headwinds” trying to grow its gross merchandise value (GMV), or total sales in a given quarter. The company’s fourth-quarter GMV was $114.7 million, which is flat year-over-year.
The company posted a net loss of $700,000 in Q4 2024, versus a profit of $300,000 a year earlier. Some of Thinkific’s Q4 initiatives, however, could bear fruit in the future. Thinkific also launched multiple AI-driven features in the last three months of 2024, including onboarding for new customers, a course landing page generator, and an email marketing tool.
The positive cash flow represents an important turnaround for Thinkific. The company grew rapidly during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, as customers turned to online courses to sustain their businesses. It went public in April 2021 with a gross $184 million raised through its initial stock offering. Steep losses that year nonetheless prompted it to lay off 20 percent of its staff in March 2022, and cut another 19 percent in January 2023.
At the time, Smith vowed a “return to profitability” by the end of 2023, and Thinkific achieved the feat in the last quarter of that year. It recorded revenue growth in the first quarter of 2024, and made key executive appointments in June that included former leaders from Hootsuite, Mailchimp, NBC, and Shopify.
The brand has numerous high-profile competitors, such as Absorb and Coursera. Thinkific touts over 50,000 customers, including high-profile clients like social-media monitoring giant Hootsuite and Stanford University.
Feature image courtesy Thinkific.