Baby bird
If you’ve ever been annoyed at having to prove you’re not a robot on a website, and you’ve been irritated by a Duolingo notification to get back to your lessons, you can direct your frustrations toward Luis von Ahn, a Guatemalan entrepreneur behind both. Having sold his online authentication software idea reCAPTCHA to Google for “somewhere between $10m and $100m” in 2009, von Ahn teamed up with one of his PhD students, the aptly-named Severin Hacker, to take on the world of education. Deciding they wanted to make language learning affordable, the pair founded Duolingo in 2011, drumming up $3.3m in funding from investors such as Tim Ferriss and Ashton Kutcher.
The platform didn’t launch to the public until June 2012, but ever since the app has soared in popularity, becoming the center of the modern language-learning universe. By leaning into bite-sized lessons, users are hooked in their millions into starting what is otherwise a daunting prospect: learning to speak, write, and maybe even think, in another language.
Saying the right words
After its launch, Duolingo picked up traction quickly, nudging towards the top end of the highly-competitive education charts on app stores. By 2014, the company closed a $20 million Series C round, having picked up 25 million registered users. Fast forward a decade, and those milestones look almost petite, with registered users growing to over 500 million by the end of 2020, when we all had newfound time to pursue long-postponed goals for self-betterment.
But, even more impressive, perhaps, is the share of ‘Lingo heads who use the app regularly, with 83 million people actively choosing to reckon with reflexive verbs at least once a month, and more than 24 million doing the same every day, per the company’s latest figures. So, how did Duolingo win in a space that’s so competitive? They made learning fun… and addictive.
