Drag the words onto a line, hit “check” and “You are correct” appears at the bottom of the screen with a satisfying chime. In a typical exercise, the sentence “I eat bread” appears above seven bubbled words. The app’s three-minute lessons are designed with a simple interface. Duolingo grabs users with gamification tricks like points, treasure chests and “streaks” for continuous use. “Our retention is comparable to games,” he says. He also boasts that users are less likely to quit Duolingo than they are to bail out of competing language apps. He likes to say that the money he forfeits giving away the app is equivalent to the cost of his rivals’ bloated marketing budgets. The company isn’t profitable, but Von Ahn says it will be cash-flow positive this year. Employee head count will rise from 170 to 200 by year’s end.ĭuolingo’s headquarters, in a converted furniture store in East Liberty, a gentrifying neighborhood not far from Google’s Pittsburgh office, is set to expand to a second floor. Von Ahn says that will climb to $86 million in 2019 and $160 million in 2020 as more users sign on and pay for the premium app, which will attract them with new features. Only 1.75% of Duolingo’s users pay for its ad-free version ($84 a year), but because its base is so huge, revenue hit $36 million last year. Another competitor, Berlin-based Babbel, says its revenue of more than $115 million comes from the $85-a-year subscription fee it charges its million-plus subscribers. Venture capitalists have pumped in $108 million, ballooning Duolingo’s valuation to $700 million in 2017, $150 million more than the market capitalization of Rosetta Stone, its 27-year-old publicly traded rival.Īlong with teaching more languages (Rosetta Stone offers 25), Duolingo attracts users because its basic ad-supported version is free, compared with the $120 a year Rosetta Stone charges its 500,000 subscribers. Seven years after its launch, it has nearly 30 million active monthly users, according to its own figures. À la Wikipedia, Duolingo enlists volunteers to help create its more obscure courses. They include little-spoken tongues like Hawaiian, Navajo and Gaelic and the fictional language High Valyrian from the HBO blockbuster Game of Thrones (1.2 million users are studying it). Duolingo already offers more languages than its competitors do, 36 at last count.

Lingo learning