- Pittsburgh-based Duolingo announced it has raised $30 million in Series F funding from existing investor CapitalG at a $1.5 billion valuation
Pittsburgh-based Duolingo announced it has raised $30 million in Series F funding from Alphabet subsidiary and existing investor CapitalG at a valuation of $1.5 billion. With this round of funding, Duolingo plans to invest in R&D of its products and accelerate the growth and expansion of the team.
Including this round of funding, Duolingo has raised a total of $138 million. Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, Union Square Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Drive Capital, Ashton Kutcher, and Tim Ferriss are also listed as investors in Dueling.
“We started Duolingo with the mission of making education free and accessible to everybody, and I’m very proud that we’ve now also built a strong business,” said Luis 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 most widely used and top-grossing language-learning app worldwide.”
Duolingo has 30 million monthly active learners and the company runs the most downloaded education app in the world — which grew organically through word-of-mouth. Ever since Duolingo raised its last funding round in July 2017, the company grew revenue through its paid subscription offering called Duolingo Plus. And it is now the top-grossing education app worldwide.
Duolingo Plus removes the ads from the app and it provides additional features. All of the educational content on Duolingo continues to be free.
Some of the recent developments include an option to offer even more learning resources. Plus Duolingo has released top-ranked podcasts to help Spanish and French learners with listening comprehension. And the company introduced Duolingo Events to connect learners all over the world in person to practice conversation.
“Duolingo has been adding users and revenue at an impressive pace, continuing to solidify their position as the #1 way to learn a language globally,” added Laela Sturdy, General Partner at CapitalG. “The team has demonstrated that sticking to their mission of providing free education is not only good for the world, but it’s also good for business. We are thrilled to continue to support them in this next stage of growth.”
Duolingo also added new courses for major languages such as Chinese, Korean, Hindi and Arabic as well as endangered languages such as Navajo and Hawaiian. And the company grew from 95 employees in July 2017 to 200 today. Plus the company also opened offices in New York, Seattle, and Beijing.
