It’s unlikely that Bill Gates and Khloé Kardashian share very many passions and interests in common. However, if Bloomberg is to be believed, Duolingo is one of them.
Since its introduction in 2012, the gamified language application has developed from a doctoral thesis into a public company that employs five hundred people and is now driven to achieve financial success.
The application currently has 3.7 million paid subscribers and 15 million daily users, which is an increase of 51% year over year. It sees sites like TikTok and Netflix as its primary competitors. It is anticipated that revenue will exceed $365 million this year, representing a year-over-year increase of 45 percent from the previous year unless there is an unexpected financial blowback caused by its highly contentious redesign.
The company is currently growing through in-app purchases, topics such as reading and mathematics, and an online English test that costs $49 and is accepted at 4,000+ institutions and made approximately $25 million in revenue in 2017.
An interesting tidbit is that the co-founder of Duolingo, Luis von Ahn, was the one who came up with the idea for the web authentication tool CAPTCHA, which he later gave away for free to Yahoo and then sold to Google.
