Duolingo, Inc. operates as a mobile learning platform. The company also provides digital English language proficiency assessment exam.
The company’s products are powered by sophisticated data analytics and AI and delivered with world-class art, animation, and design to make it easier for learners to stay motivated, master new material, and achieve their learning goals.
The company’s flagship app has organically become the world’s most popular way to learn languages and the top-grossing Educati...
Duolingo, Inc. operates as a mobile learning platform. The company also provides digital English language proficiency assessment exam.
The company’s products are powered by sophisticated data analytics and AI and delivered with world-class art, animation, and design to make it easier for learners to stay motivated, master new material, and achieve their learning goals.
The company’s flagship app has organically become the world’s most popular way to learn languages and the top-grossing Education app in the app stores. For many, Duolingo has become synonymous with language learning: for example, on Google, people search for the term ‘Duolingo’ approximately nineteen times more often than ‘learn Spanish.’ The company is particularly proud that its learners come from the entire socioeconomic spectrum, ranging from billionaires and celebrities to recently resettled refugees, a rare instance in which more money does not imply better access to a high-quality educational platform.
The company started with a focus on teaching languages because of the profound impact learning a new language can have on people’s lives, as well as the large market opportunity.
As of December 31, 2024, Duolingo offered courses in over 40 languages to more than 100 million monthly active users. To provide perspective on the company’s reach, in the United States (U.S), the number of people learning a language using Duolingo is greater than the number of K-12 students taking a foreign language class in school, and there are more people learning certain languages on Duolingo, like Irish and Hawaiian, than there are native speakers of those languages worldwide.
Duolingo is the learning product built for the mobile generation: bite-sized, on-demand and fun. The company’s obsession with user experience has yielded affinity and loyalty in its learners, which in turn has helped the company cultivate millions of brand advocates who tell their friends and families about its products. The company’s brand has become part of pop culture, appearing in internet memes and in sketches on late night comedy shows. The company’s official social media accounts have generated more than ten billion impressions to date and has been highlighted by numerous press outlets. All of this has allowed the company to grow its business organically, primarily relying on word-of-mouth and brand buzz rather than paid user acquisition.
The company’s millions of learners complete over a billion exercises every day, creating what it believes to be the world's largest learning dataset. This data powers the high-volume A/B testing and novel AI that the company uses to continually improve how well it teaches.
The company’s freemium business model, which means allowing users to access its content for free and charging a subscription for additional features, is core to its success because it enables significant user scale. Anyone can download the Duolingo App, use it for as long as they like, and complete as many of its courses as they choose, all without paying anything. Learners who use Duolingo for free see an ad at the end of each lesson, whereas learners who purchase one of its paid subscriptions enjoy an ad-free experience and access to additional features. As of December 31, 2024, approximately 9% of the company’s monthly active users were paid subscribers. The company’s paid subscriber penetration has increased significantly since it launched its paid subscription in 2017 and, combined with the company’s user growth, has driven strong revenue growth each year since.
The company’s growth and competitive differentiation has been driven by two mutually reinforcing flywheels: its learning flywheel and its investment flywheel.
Learning Flywheel: The greater the scale of the company’s learner base, the more it can use insights from data analytics to improve both engagement and efficacy. The more engaging its products are, and the more effectively the company teaches, the more its learners tell their friends about Duolingo and the more the company continue to grow its learner base.
Investment Flywheel: The scale of the company’s learner base and word-of-mouth growth allows it to focus the company’s capital investments on product innovation and data analytics, as opposed to relying on brand or performance marketing. The more learners use Duolingo and convert into paid subscribers, the more the company is able to invest in creating an even more delightful, engaging and effective learning experience. In turn, this increases the company’s popularity and user scale, as well as the effectiveness of its data analytics and AI systems, further widening the company’s data moat.
In 2016, the company launched the Duolingo English Test, an online, on-demand assessment of English proficiency. Every year, millions of people around the world seek to demonstrate English proficiency for a variety of reasons, including university admissions, work visas, and job applications. The company developed the Duolingo English Test because language assessment has lacked innovation, with the most popular English proficiency tests still administered in physical testing centers and usually costing hundreds of dollars per test. By offering a more accessible, online option that is both rigorous and accurate, the company provides greater opportunities for aspiring students and professionals dependent on the successful completion of these high stakes assessments. As of December 31, 2024, over 5,600 education programs around the world accept the Duolingo English Test results as proof of English proficiency for international student admissions, with over 4,700 of those being higher education programs. These include 24 of the top 25 undergraduate programs in the U.S. ranked by international enrollment, as well as top schools such as Yale, Stanford, MIT, Duke and Columbia.
In 2022 the company launched a math course that motivates both children and adults to sharpen their mental math skills in its standards-aligned curriculum. In 2023, the company also launched a new music course that's designed to teach music literacy, including how to read music notes and play songs. The Math and Music courses have both been integrated into the Duolingo App.
The Duolingo Learning Experience
The Duolingo learning experience sits at the rare intersection of fun and self-improvement. Learners love Duolingo because:
Duolingo feels more like a mobile game than an education product. The company’s bite-sized lessons and gamification features motivate learners to come back each day to continue learning. As of December 31, 2024, there were about 32 million daily active users with a 7-day streak, or longer, and about 10 million daily active users with a 365-day streak or longer. A streak indicates the number of days in a row a lesson is completed.
Learners stick with Duolingo at first because it’s fun, and then over time also because they find that it works. The company’s expert-designed courses across languages, math, and music help learners build robust skills, and its AI technologies power personalization leading to superior learning outcomes. For more information, please visit https://www.duolingo.com/efficacy.
Every course on Duolingo is free to access. Learners can spend as much time learning as they want and complete any and every course without paying. This lowers barriers to start learning and to keep learning.
In a world where people are increasingly engaged in immersive, bite-sized, mobile-first experiences, the company provides an experience that also results in learning valuable skills.
The Duolingo Method
The Duolingo Method, which is the company’s approach to teaching, consists of five principles that guide how it creates new learning content, design engaging lessons, and build courses that are as effective as they are fun. The company’s learning, product, and design teams has developed this approach by combining research on teaching and learning, its experiences as teachers, and the results of more than a decade studying how the company’s self-guided learners learn best.
Learn by Doing
Each Duolingo lesson is designed with interactive exercises that put learners at the center of their own learning and allows them to immediately use what they are learning. This type of learning-by-doing engages the brain and leverages its natural ability to pick up on patterns present in the surroundings, often without conscious realization—it's a fundamental way the company’s minds operate. Duolingo lessons draw learners' attention to important patterns (such as verb conjugations or word order rules for language, or fraction creation for math), helping to solidify these concepts over time so that learners are ready to use what they learn in the real world.
Learn in a Personalized Way
Tailored lessons enable learners to progress at their own pace, adapting the material to their individual strengths and weaknesses. The company’s AI models track their learning journey, adjusting the order and difficulty of the exercises they see so that they always see a balance of familiar and more challenging content. Research shows that giving learners just the right level of difficulty—right at the edge of what they know—pushes them toward developing new skills and leads to higher engagement. The company also uses algorithms to create unique practice sessions that help learners strengthen the skills where they could use the most help.
Focus on What Matters
The company’s curricula are informed by national and international standards to provide comprehensive coverage of what’s considered important for each field of knowledge. The company then complement these documented standards with its learning experts' experience to develop well-rounded courses that give learners a strong foundation and all the tools to take their learning out into the world.
Stay Motivated
The entire Duolingo experience is designed to support learners in maintaining their study habits over the long term. With bite-sized lessons that require just a few minutes to complete, fitting study into a busy schedule becomes effortless. The gamification elements within each course are designed to encourage a return to learning: completing lessons awards points and extends streaks, while offering numerous chances for collaboration and friendly competition with other learners.
Feel the Delight
The company know people learn better when they have joyful experiences, so it builds light-hearted learning into every course and lesson. The company’s cheerful characters, with their own personalities and backstories, show up throughout the courses and make the learning experience more interesting and meaningful. Learners also find encouraging words and supportive messages from Duo the owl. And this fun spirit is in the lessons, too, because funny content sticks and makes learning more memorable.
Solutions
The Duolingo App
The Duolingo App is the world’s most popular way to learn languages. Accessible for free, as of December 31, 2024, it offers courses in over 40 languages to more than 100 million monthly active users. It is also the top-grossing app globally in the Education category on both Google Play and the Apple App Store. Duolingo can also be accessed by desktop computers via a web browser at https://duolingo.com. Math and Music courses are also integrated into the Duolingo App.
Super Duolingo
All Duolingo’s course content can be accessed for free, the company’s subscription offering, Super Duolingo, offers learners additional features to enhance their learning experience. In 2021, the company launched a family plan, which includes up to six subscribers under one annual plan.
Duolingo Max
Duolingo Max is a premium subscription tier launched in 2023 and offered to a portion of the company’s user base and priced higher than Super Duolingo. It gives learners access to the existing features of Super Duolingo in addition to incremental features and exercises powered by generative AI technology.
Duolingo English Test: AI-Driven Language Assessment
The Duolingo English Test is an online, on-demand, high-stakes (e.g., used for university admissions) English proficiency assessment. Anyone with a computer, webcam, and reliable internet connection can take the test from anywhere, at any time. The test is ‘computer adaptive’, meaning it gets harder or easier depending on the performance of the test taker, and can be completed in less than an hour.
Other Initiatives
Duolingo also offers Duolingo for Schools and Duolingo ABC. Duolingo for Schools is a web-based tool that aims to make it easier for teachers to use the Duolingo platform in a structured learning environment, like a classroom. Duolingo ABC is an app that teaches young children early literacy skills.
Sales and Marketing
Key elements of the company’s sales and marketing strategy include:
Brand Building
The company’s brand marketing increases awareness of Duolingo through online and offline campaigns that drive press, social sharing, and more word-of-mouth virality. Investments in the company’s brand enables it to drive long-term growth by attracting new learners to the company’s platform and keeping existing learners engaged. The company leverages its iconic brand on social media platforms to drive organic new user growth and engagement with entertaining content, instead of promotional content, that takes advantage of viral trends and Duolingo memes created by the company’s community.
Owned Media Marketing
The company’s owned media marketing engages its learner community, creating millions of brand advocates who drive word-of-mouth virality by sharing their love of Duolingo within their networks. The company sends its learners personalized emails and push notifications that provide progress reports, lesson reminders, and sometimes a simple message of positivity to encourage them to remain engaged.
Paid Acquisition
The company complements and accelerates its organic user growth with strategic and targeted paid user acquisition. The company’s performance marketing strategy is focused on targeting high quality user segments around the world that are more likely to retain well as users and/or subscribe.
Geographic Expansion
In markets where the company’s organic awareness is relatively low and the opportunity for growth is strong, it hires experienced local marketing managers and engage in localized social media and influencer-led campaigns, app store optimization, and paid advertising to generate interest in the company’s products and drive new learner growth.
Intellectual Property
The company owns several trademarks that has been registered, or for which registration applications are pending, in the U.S. as well as in a number of foreign jurisdictions. These trademarks include, among others, the word marks ‘Duolingo’ and Duolingo in Chinese, and certain logos used in connection with its business, including the company’s mascot Duo.
The company has registered several domain names, including www.duolingo.com, and it owns several copyrights (both registered and unregistered) covering logos and characters used in the company’s business, including Duo.
Government Regulation
The company is also subject to laws that govern specific types of data and/or specific types of marketing or other consumer engagement activities. For example, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) applies to operators of commercial websites and online services directed to U.S. children under the age of 13 that collect personal information from children and to operators of general audience sites that has actual knowledge that they are collecting information from U.S. children under the age of 13.
In the European Economic Area (EEA) the company is subject to the General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 (GDPR) and in the United Kingdom (U.K.) it is subject to the U.K. GDPR. The GDPR and the U.K.
Research and Development
The company's research and development expenses were $ 235.3 million during the year ended December 31, 2024.
History
Duolingo, Inc. was founded in 2011. The company was incorporated in 2011.
