Business Description

Our mission is to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available. Although education can open the door to economic opportunity, it is also among the principal sources of inequality: the privileged can get the best education in the world, while those with fewer resources, especially in developing countries, may not be able to get even basic schooling. That is why we started Duolingo. We believe that everyone, regardless of how wealthy they are, should have access to high quality education. And today, the technology necessary to enable this is in the hands of billions of people, in the form of a smartphone. At Duolingo, we build products native to the smartphone—bite-sized, on-demand and engaging—to make learning accessible and effective, opening doors for everyone alike. Who We Are Duolingo is a technology company founded by two engineers, Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker. Luis and Severin met at Carnegie Mellon University, where Luis was a professor in the Computer Science Department and Severin was his Ph.D. student. Luis, a MacArthur Fellow, grew up in Guatemala and witnessed firsthand the tremendous impact that access to high quality education can have on people’s lives. Luis and Severin bonded over the dream of building an intelligent learning system informed by massive amounts of user engagement data that could deliver superior learning outcomes. Our team, which as of December 31, 2025, consisted of more than 900 passionate employees, including more than 430 engineers, aims to build the most sophisticated education platform in the world. We believe that by combining modern technology, the very best talent, and a mission-driven approach, we can create better learning experiences and meaningful improvements in efficacy. Our 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. Our Business Our 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” much more often than “learn Spanish.” We are particularly proud that our 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. We 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. According to HolonIQ in January 2024, consumer spend on both online and offline language learning is expected to reach about $123 billion by 2027. Driving much of the demand for language learning is the reality that English can unlock tremendous economic opportunity. And the power of language learning is not limited to economic advancement. Learning another language can unlock new experiences and deepen human connections, ranging from navigating a first trip to another country to communicating with family members of an older generation. As of December 31, 2025, Duolingo offers over 250 total language courses to more than 130 million monthly active users. To provide perspective on our 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. 6 Table of Contents While languages remain our core focus, we began expanding into additional subjects aligned with our mission to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available. We now offer courses in Math and Music, and recently launched Chess, which is growing rapidly as learners embrace these new subjects on the Duolingo platform. Duolingo is the learning product built for the mobile generation: bite-sized, on-demand, and fun. We believe that the hardest part of learning something new is staying motivated, so we build gamification features into our platform to motivate our learners, and we run thousands of A/B tests to optimize each feature for maximum engagement.…