Duolingo’s company strategy: how our mission fuels our growth

At Duolingo, we’re known to take the long view, prioritizing long-term success over short-term gains. What allows us to achieve lasting success—and what gives us confidence in the decisions we make day to day—are the mission, beliefs, and strategy pillars that guide our work at Duolingo.

Duolingo was founded with a clear mission

Our mission is to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available. 

Duolingo was founded by Carnegie Mellon engineers Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker, who shared a vision of using technology to transform education. As non-native English speakers, they understood firsthand the life-changing impact of education. They also knew quality education was out of reach for much of the world. We’re here to change that. We started with language learning to drive economic opportunity, but our vision is bigger—a 100-year company redefining how the world learns.

3 beliefs that drive Duolingo strategy

There are a few beliefs that have shaped how we’ve built Duolingo from the beginning. From a small team of idealistic engineers in Pittsburgh to a multi-billion public company with 850+ employees, our core beliefs remain unchanged.

The freemium business model is good for our mission and our business. We grow by offering an incredible free product and monetize by making the paid version worth it. This fuels a growth flywheel, which works like this: 

• More learners feed our experimentation engine, leading to better products. 
• Better products lead to greater efficacy and engagement, which drives organic word-of-mouth growth — growing our number of learners. 
• More learners drives more subscribers, allowing us to keep investing in innovation.

We have always bet on technology. From day one, we’ve built our product assuming that tech is only going to get better. We embraced early text-to-speech despite its early robotic sound, and soon, high-quality audio was effortless. The same goes for AI. We’re using AI to accelerate content generation—we shipped 7,500 content units in 2024 (up from 425 in 2021)—and create new learning experiences like Video Call (a feature for real-time conversation practice with our character, Lily) that would have been impossible a few years ago. 

We prioritize building an excellent product. The only sustainable way to attract, retain, teach, and monetize users is by making a better product. Spammy notifications, deceptive patterns, and heavy paid acquisition are short-term tactics. Instead, we focus on long-term engagement—and since motivation is the hardest part of learning, we design Duolingo to be something users want to return to daily. We obsess over product quality, running 750+ A/B tests per quarter and refining every detail to make sure the experience is useful, intuitive, and delightful.

Duolingo’s five strategy pillars 

At Duolingo, we have five evergreen Strategy Pillars. These are goals that we’re always working toward, with specific numbers and initiatives that change every year. 

1. Grow users. While we’ve 10X’d the number of DAUs from 2019 to 40M today, we believe we’re only getting started. It’s estimated that nearly 2 billion people are learning a language globally. We see enormous opportunity with English Learners, who represent roughly 80% of language learners worldwide but only 46% of our DAUs. In line with our core beliefs, our investment in growth is almost all in product R&D, with marketing used to strategically accelerate growth.

2. Teach better. We’re innovators in using technology to teach, and even developed our own approach to teaching, The Duolingo Method, to apply learning science to our products. Still, we’re still constantly raising the bar. In addition, we have a team of efficacy research experts who regularly evaluate how well we’re teaching, and when we find gaps, we create new features to address them. For instance, in 2023 we created an in-app short-form podcast, DuoRadio, to better teach listening, the prerequisite skill for speaking. 

3. Grow subscribers. Since we became a publicly traded company in 2021, we have increased the percentage of monthly active users who pay for Duolingo from ~5% to 8.8%. To turn free users into paying subscribers, we focus on two core things: making our subscription features excellent, and optimizing purchase flows. Just as we believe there is significant DAU opportunity with English learners, we believe there are millions of potential international subscribers we haven’t reached yet. 

4. Become the proficiency standard. We want Duolingo to be the standard for language proficiency—like saying, “I’m a Duolingo French 70” instead of “I’m intermediate.” 10 years ago we launched the world’s first web-only English assessment, Duolingo English Test (DET), which is now accepted by 5,500+ institutions, including 97 of the top 100 U.S. universities. In 2024, we launched the in-app Duolingo Score for learners to track their progress and benchmark themselves on our scale.

5. Expand beyond language learning. We’ve never wanted to limit ourselves to just language learning, and we launched Math and Music in the Duolingo app in 2023. Like language learning, Math and Music are large, universally appealing subjects that take years to master, and we believe that our fun, effective method for teaching lends itself well to both of them. 

How we do strategy differently

We don’t have a detailed 3- or 5-year strategic plan or product roadmap. We’ve found that even the most detailed and well-researched plans and product roadmaps can’t hold a candle to what we can build when we test, learn, and iterate. Internally, we call this approach “The Green Machine,” and it goes like this: gather excellent people, give them space to experiment, and then double down on what works. 

While our Beliefs and Strategy Pillars help guide the Green Machine’s direction, we rely on incredible talent to figure out how to build the best educational product in the world. Achieving our mission depends on attracting and retaining outstanding people, and we expect our talent to stay and grow with Duolingo. The numbers bear us out: we have >90% annual employee retention, a true rarity in tech. 

Learn more and grow with us

Duolingo’s mission, beliefs, and strategy pillars got us where we are, and they’ll lead us to where we’re going. Want to know more about how we operate at Duolingo? We’ve laid it all out in The Duolingo Handbook. Interested in becoming a Duo? Explore Careers at Duolingo.

*Figures as of Q1 2025