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Duolingo company history timeline

2011

Duolingo launched its private beta on 30 November 2011, and accumulated a waiting list of more than 300,000 people.

Back at CMU in 2011, he and Swiss-born grad student Severin Hacker (yes, really) focused on an idea the two had been mulling while Von Ahn was at Google, a free digital language-learning tool.

2013

By July 2013, the service has grown to 5 million users and was rated the #1 free education app in the Google Play store.

2014

On 18 February 2014, Duolingo announced that it had raised $20 million from a Series C funding round led by Kleiner Caufield & Byers, with prior investors also participating.

In 2014 he ditched the translation business, and for the next three years the company had no revenue.

2015

On 10 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 $83.3 million.

2016

In April 2016, it was reported that Duolingo had more than 18 million monthly users.

2017

On 25 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 $108.3 million.

In 2017 he introduced Google and Facebook ads, followed by ad-free subscriptions.

2018

On 1 August 2018, Duolingo surpassed 300 million registered users.

2019

Duolingo is on Forbes' 2019 list of Next Billion-Dollar Startups.

2021

On 28 June 2021, Duolingo filed to go public on the NASDAQ exchange under the ticker symbol DUOL.

But TOEFL executive director Srikant Gopal says the correlation is meaningless because the DET has only “rudimentary exercises that bear little resemblance to how English is actually used in academic settings.” Nevertheless, Von Ahn hopes the test will account for 20% of revenue by 2021.

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Founded
2011
Company founded
Headquarters
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Founders
Luis von Ahn,Severin Hacker,Cammie Dunaway,Rogelio Alvarez
Company founders
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Duolingo competitors

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LinkedIn2003$3.0B15,000448
wikiHow2005$16.0M249-
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Google1998$350.0B139,9953,624
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IBM1911$62.8B270,0003,940
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Cloudflare2009$1.7B2,432322
Udacity2011$100.0M4,21511

Duolingo history FAQs

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