Learning a new language can be intimidating, however, Duolingo has found a way to make it easy and simple. Now the popular language learning app has closed a new of 29.6 million euros (35 million dollars), with which it has managed to raise its total valuation to 2,000 million euros.
A round year for Duolingo’s finances
This injection of resources comes at the end of a crucial year for the popularization of distance learning throughout the world, driven by health restrictions. In fact, the company itself has explained that its student base has grown by 30% in the last twelve months.
Just a year ago, Duolingo had closed a Series F round for 30 million dollars (almost 28 million euros) of CapitalG, the growth capital investment fund of (Google’s parent company)as well as an existing investor in the company.
With this collection Duolingo reached the status of , by achieving a valuation of 1,350 million eurosmore than double that achieved after its series E in 2017.
The most downloaded educational app in the world
With more than 30 million monthly active studentsDuolingo is the most downloaded educational app in the world today, with 500 million downloads in total.
The big step forward at the business level came in 2017, when the company managed to significantly increase its revenue through its paid subscription offer, DuolingoPlus, with which it has also become the leader among the educational apps with the highest grossing worldwide. With Duolingo Plus, users can access their lessons free of ads, in addition to offering additional features, however, all the educational content of Duolingo is totally free.
How Duolingo works
Duolingo is one of the most popular apps to learn languages in recent years. It exchanged the rigorous and difficult of learning a language via a conventional class for a game-like interface, where the process of learning a language becomes entertaining and to some extent addictive, for free and within the reach of practically everyone who owns a smartphone (or in their case, via a laptop or PC, with simple internet access).
This language learning tool can be used on any smartphone or tabletand it has been helping -for some time now- its users to learn different languages than their native ones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9tUaDKUQ8A
Also, the people at Duolingo have been able to create everything a crowdsourcing model. Duolingo is designed in such a way that as the user progresses in his learning, it helps to translate web pages and other documents that are basically inserted by the administrators of the platform.
As of today, it offers courses in Spanish, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Russian, Catalan, Esperanto, Guarani (jopará), Chinese, Korean, Hindi, Arabic and Swedish, but it is not ruled out that new language courses are in the process of being created, as well as endangered languages such as Navajo and Hawaiian.
We must recognize that Duolingo has proven to be an effective tool. An average of 34 hours of Duolingo is the equivalent of a college semester of language class, according to an independent study conducted by the City University of New York and the University of South Carolina in the United States. In addition, it is worth noting that Duolingo was voted one of the essential school apps by TIME Magazine, which suggests a wide recognition by the vox populi.
Duolingo Schools, a refined option for teachers and students
Another great addition to the Duolingo gallery was their site called Duolingo (Duolingo for Schools). It is basically the same base platform as Duolingo but brought to the classroom, in which a professor can make groups of students, assign them tasks and review their progress.
This undoubtedly becomes an excellent tool for all teachers, since they can access the platform for free and start sending invitations to their students to register with Duolingo.
“The Language Incubator”
In May 2013, its founder announced that it would create the necessary tools for the community to build new language courses, hoping to introduce new languages and “encourage other experts and people passionate about a specific language to follow suit”.
That initiative ended up gestating as the ««, a project that was launched in October of that same year. In addition to helping the community to quickly build language courses, the Incubator also has the objective of helping to preserve dead or unpopular languages, such as Latin or Basque.
New features in Duolingo
Recent Duolingo developments include:
- Podcast, that allow users to learn Spanish and French with listening comprehension.
- Doulingo Storiesto help with reading comprehension
- Duolingo Eventswhich connects learners from around the world in person to practice speaking.
“We started Duolingo with the mission of making education something free and accessible to alland I am very proud that we have also built a strong business”said Louis Von Ahn, CEO and co-founder of Duolingo. “CapitalG has been a valuable partner to Duolingo over the past few years, and we look forward to using this investment to continue our growth and further solidify our position as the world’s most used and highest grossing language learning app.”
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