Chegg

Dan Rosensweig has served as Chairman, CEO, and President since 2010. Before Chegg, he was Chief Operating Officer at Yahoo and held leadership roles at ZDNet and CNET Networks. He is the primary operator shaping the company's pivot from physical textbook rentals into a digital subscription platform.

Chegg generates revenue through two main channels: subscription services and physical textbook rentals. Subscription revenue comes from Chegg Study (step-by-step homework help), Mathway, and writing tools, typically priced around $19.95 per month. The company reported annual revenue of roughly $716 million in 2022, though AI disruption has pressured subscription growth since 2023.

Chegg's structural advantage comes from its publisher relationships. It contracts with Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and Cengage to rent their textbooks at scale, which feeds a captive student audience into its digital subscription products. No competitor replicates this combination of physical textbook logistics and a proprietary digital answer ecosystem — though free AI tools have eroded the paid-subscription value proposition.

No. In February 2025, Chegg announced a definitive agreement to be acquired by a private equity consortium for $7.50 per share in cash, taking the company private. The transaction was expected to close in mid-2025, subject to shareholder and regulatory approvals.

Chegg's subscription growth stalled significantly after ChatGPT launched in late 2022, because students began using free generative AI tools as homework-help substitutes. CEO Dan Rosensweig acknowledged in May 2023 earnings calls that the company was seeing elevated churn and new-signup pressure. The company responded by launching its own AI-powered tutor, CheggMate, built on GPT-4, but the take-private deal in 2025 reflected sustained market-cap compression.

Chegg has used acquisitions to layer capabilities onto its textbook-rental base. Notable deals include Imagine Easy Solutions (citation tools, 2016), WriteLab (AI writing feedback, 2018), Mathway (on-demand math solver, 2020), and Busuu (language learning, 2021). The company also acquired online coding bootcamp Thinkful in 2019.

Yes. Chegg's homework-help model has drawn scrutiny from universities and professors who argue it enables cheating. In 2021, the company cooperated with academic-integrity investigations at several universities, providing user data after reports of exam misuse. This ongoing tension with academic institutions creates operational and reputational risk distinct from typical edtech competition.