The project was originally sponsored by Luis von Ahn's MacArthur fellowship and a National Science Foundation grant. Hacker (co-founder and current CTO of Duolingo) believed that 'free education will really change the world' and wanted to supply people an outlet to do so.

A driving motivation was Von Ahn's upbringing in Guatemala, where he saw how expensive it was for people in his community to learn English.

Von Ahn had sold his second company, reCAPTCHA, to Google and, with Hacker, wanted to work on something related to education. The idea for Duolingo was initiated at the end of 2009 in Pittsburgh by Carnegie Mellon University professor Luis von Ahn and his Swiss-born post-graduate student Severin Hacker. Duolingo offers a premium service which eliminates advertising and offers more features. The company uses a freemium model with over 500 million registered users. Duolingo also offers the Duolingo English Test certification program and a literacy app for children called Duolingo ABC, and the company released an elementary level math app called Duolingo Math currently exclusive to iOS.

The platform was founded in 2011 by Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker and has since grown to become one of the most popular language learning apps in the world.ĭuolingo offers a wide range of language courses, teaching over 100 languages, from popular languages such as English, Spanish, French, and German, to less commonly studied languages such as Welsh, Irish, and Swahili. Language and mathematics courses and tests.Ģ7 November 2011 11 years ago ( ) (private beta)ġ9 June 2012 10 years ago ( ) (public release)ĭuolingo ( / ˌ dj uː oʊ ˈ l ɪ ŋ ɡ oʊ/ DEW-oh- LING-goh) is an American educational technology company which produces learning apps and provides language certification. Online education, Professional certificationĭuolingo, Duolingo Math, Duolingo ABC, Duolingo English Test

Duolingo cost per year