Duolingo was founded in 2011 to help build a future where high quality education is available to everyone, no matter how much money they have or where they live. At the heart of the company is the belief that better access to education can help significantly reduce economic inequality in the world.
This week we reached a major milestone that will help further our mission: becoming a publicly traded company, trading on Nasdaq under the symbol DUOL.
We will remain mission-driven
As a private company, I always told potential investors the same thing: we’re a mission-driven organization, and that will never change. If you are investing in us, you are investing in our mission and our vision for a more fair and equitable world.
As we go public, I want to reaffirm the commitment I have made to investors over the years. Duolingo’s S-1, which is the formal registration paperwork we filed with the S.E.C. in order to go public, contains a letter I wrote to all our future investors that I want to share here:
Dear potential investors,
The main thing you need to know is that I plan to dedicate my life to building a future in which, through technology, every person on this planet has access to the best quality of education. And not only that, but a future in which people want to spend their time learning.
Duolingo is the platform for building that future, and we are just getting started.
Our mission is and always will be to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available.
Why Duolingo is going public now
Over the course of history, most durable, long-term companies are public, and since we have a lot more left to accomplish, we plan to be around for a long time. Being public will help us grow into the company we need to become to further our mission.
We've already achieved some tremendous things over the past decade. We have grown into a team of over 400 people and we offer courses in over 40 languages to around 40 million monthly active learners. We are also leading the charge in online testing, and administered over 300,000 Duolingo English Tests last year. But we’re just getting started. We have ambitious goals, and it’s going to take a lot more people to help us reach them. Being a public company will give us the resources and visibility to keep hiring world-class talent and growing our team.
Duolingo wouldn’t be where it is today without the people who built it and the investors who made it possible for us to succeed. This IPO is an opportunity to celebrate their hard work and their continuous support. I also want to acknowledge the major impact of our external course contributors who helped build many of our courses, allowing us to teach a variety of smaller or endangered languages.
One of the things that makes me the proudest in life is that our flagship app has organically become the top-grossing app in the Education category on both Google Play and the Apple App Store, while we have still been offering all of our learning content for free. We’ve always believed that learning a language shouldn’t cost a lot of money, and that it should be available to everyone. By becoming a public company, we are also giving everyone the opportunity to invest in and benefit from Duolingo’s success.
What does this mean for Duolingo’s future?
Our IPO is not a goal in itself, it’s simply a stepping stone to achieving our mission. I prefer to think of it like a graduation, a transition from one chapter to the next.
As a public company, I expect our employees to work with an even greater focus and intensity, and to continue to uphold the core values that have helped us get here: focusing our energy on product development, and making sure that learning with Duolingo is always fun, effective, and available to everyone.
I am so inspired by what we have achieved and, most importantly, what we are setting out to do next. Here’s to building the future we believe in!