34 Facts About Duolingo

Duolingo is an American educational technology company which produces apps for language-learning and provides language certification.

Duolingo offers over 100 total courses across over 40 distinct languages, from Spanish, French, German and Japanese to Navajo and Yiddish.

Duolingo uses a freemium model with over 500 million registered users.

Duolingo offers a premium service which eliminates advertising and offers more features.

Idea for Duolingo was initiated at the end of 2009 in Pittsburgh by Carnegie Mellon University professor Luis von Ahn and his post-graduate student Severin Hacker.

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In September 2012, Duolingo announced that it had raised a further $15 million from a Series B funding round led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from Union Square Ventures.

In November 2012, Duolingo released an iPhone app, followed an Android app in May 2013, at which time Duolingo had a user base of around 3 million.

In June 2015, Duolingo announced that it had raised $45 million from a Series D funding round led by Google Capital, bringing its total funding to $83.

In July 2017, Duolingo announced that it had raised $25 million in a Series E funding round led by Drive Capital, bringing its total funding to $108.

In December 2019, it was announced that Duolingo raised $30 million in a Series F funding round from Alphabet's investment company CapitalG.

Duolingo planned to use the funds to develop new products and further expand its team in sectors like engineering, business development, design, curriculum and content creators, community outreach, and marketing.

In March 2021, Duolingo announced that it will be ending its volunteer contributor program and donating money to its volunteer contributors who helped to make Duolingo.

Duolingo said that from now on, language courses will be maintained and developed by professional linguists aligning with CEFR standards.

On 28 June 2021, Duolingo filed for an initial public offering on NASDAQ under the ticker DUOL.

From August 2021 to June 2022, the Duolingo language learning app was removed from some app stores in China.

For some languages Duolingo offers podcasts for people in intermediate level consisting on stories told usually by native speakers from different parts of the world where the target language is spoken, but with simplified grammar, vocabulary, and with a slower intonation, as well with occasional assistance with providing context or explanations of unusual words in the source language by a narrator.

Badges in Duolingo represent achievements that are earned from completing specific objectives or challenges.

Duolingo provides features designed to allow teachers to track students' progress in language acquisition.

In 2022, Duolingo began rolling out a redesigned user interface, featuring a single learning path.

Duolingo provides language courses in many languages, including constructed languages such as High Valyrian and Klingon .

Duolingo ABC is a mobile app for young children for learning letters, their sounds, phonics, and other foundational early reading concepts that was released in 2020.

Duolingo English Test is a standardized test of English language proficiency for non-native English language speakers.

Duolingo had a revenue of $1 million in 2016, $13 million in 2017, $36 million in 2018, and $250.

Duolingo derived most of its revenue from subscription, advertising, and its Duolingo English Test.

Duolingo utilizes the Amazon Web Services product suite, including Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, nearly 200 virtual instances in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon Simple Storage Service and Amazon Relational Database Service .

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Duolingo provides a single-page web application for desktop computer users and smartphone applications on Android and iOS App Store platforms.

Sacco suggested that Duolingo is helpful for learning vocabulary only in addition to immersion environments like a classroom.

One proposed reason for this is that the grammar-translation method that Duolingo primarily uses is more applicable to simple words and phrases than to complex ones; simpler ones can translate in a more exact manner from one language to another and thus are more conducive to Duolingo's method.

The authors therefore suggested that Duolingo could be an effective tool for foreign language learning.

Duolingo won Best Education Startup at the 2014 Crunchies, and was the most downloaded app in the Education category in Google Play in 2013 and 2014.

Duolingo won Inc magazine's Best Workplaces 2018, Entrepreneur magazine's Top Company Culture List 2018, and appeared in CNBC's 2018 and 2019 "Disruptor 50" lists and TIME magazine's 50 Genius Companies.

In 2019, Duolingo was named one of Forbes's "Next Billion-Dollar Startups 2019".

In July 2020, Duolingo was named by PCMag as "The Best Free Language Learning App".

On 1 April 2022, Duolingo released another video in the form of a spoof legal advertisement where the lawyers sue the company for damages due to family members going missing, alluding to the meme.