Teaches 40+ languages through daily gamified lessons that get smarter the more you use them.
At a glance
- Depends onDownstream position: depends on 10 industries, supplies 4
- ScaleMarket cap is above the global median
Teaches 40+ languages through daily gamified lessons that get smarter the more you use them.
Duolingo teaches languages through short daily lessons delivered by a smartphone app, and every tap, hesitation, and wrong answer a user makes gets logged and fed back into an AI model that decides what lesson to send next. Because language learning requires months or years of consistent practice, the model gets more accurate the longer a user sticks around, which means the personalization Duolingo offers today is the product of millions of users completing or abandoning specific sequences over years — something a competitor starting from scratch cannot replicate by spending more money or hiring more engineers. The streak mechanic is what keeps users returning each day, but it depends entirely on a push notification arriving to remind them, so if Apple or Google changed their default notification settings at the OS level, the daily return habit would break, the behavioral data would thin, and the AI model's edge would quietly erode. Adding a new language to the platform is cheap to distribute but expensive to build, because the AI sits on top of human-authored content — grammar rules, cultural nuance, example sentences — that only specialist linguists can write.
How does this company make money?
Most users access Duolingo free and see ads. The company earns a monthly or annual fee from users who pay for Duolingo Plus, which removes the ads and lets lessons be downloaded for offline use. It also charges a per-test fee to anyone who takes the Duolingo English Test, a proctored exam that universities accept as proof of English proficiency. Schools that use Duolingo for Schools pay institutional licensing fees for classroom management tools.
What makes this company hard to replace?
A learner who has maintained a streak for months or years has built up a strong psychological resistance to losing that record — starting over on a competitor app means abandoning that history entirely. Progress tracking and achievement systems inside Duolingo represent a visible record of work that users are reluctant to leave behind. And the specific way Duolingo's gamification and interface work becomes familiar over time, meaning a different app feels awkward to use even if it is objectively similar.
What limits this company?
Adding a new language requires native-speaking linguists and teaching specialists to write every example sentence, grammar rule, and culturally appropriate phrase by hand. The AI personalization sits on top of that human-written content — it cannot create the content itself. So every new language pair is gated on finding and retaining specialized human talent, not on buying more computers or hiring more software engineers.
What does this company depend on?
Duolingo cannot operate without Apple App Store and Google Play Store to distribute the app to new users, AWS cloud infrastructure to serve lessons to everyone at once, native-speaker content creators to build and maintain each supported language pair, and push notification delivery systems to trigger daily return visits.
Who depends on this company?
Educational institutions using Duolingo for Schools would lose the structured language curriculum tools their classrooms rely on. Students preparing for university admissions who are using the Duolingo English Test would lose access to a credential that many universities accept as proof of English proficiency. And learners who have built long daily streaks would see their learning routine disrupted in a way that directly harms long-term language retention, since consistency is what makes the method work.
How does this company scale?
Once a lesson sequence and its AI model are built for a language pair, delivering those lessons to one million users costs almost the same as delivering them to ten million — the software just runs more copies. What does not scale cheaply is quality: every new language pair still needs specialized linguists and pedagogical designers, and that work cannot be automated away or accelerated simply by spending more money.
What external forces can significantly affect this company?
Changes to immigration policy affect how many people need English proficiency credentials like the Duolingo English Test for university admissions, which directly changes that revenue stream. Smartphone penetration rates in emerging markets set a ceiling on how many new users Duolingo can reach, since the app requires a smartphone to function. Education ministry decisions in different countries about whether to allow or require digital learning tools shape whether schools adopt Duolingo for Schools.
Where is this company structurally vulnerable?
The daily streak depends entirely on a push notification arriving to remind the user to return. If Apple or Google changed their operating systems to turn off notifications by default, restrict app notification permissions, or penalize Duolingo's ranking in the App Store or Google Play Store, the reminder would stop reaching users. Without the reminder, users miss their streak. Without the streak, they stop returning. Without daily returning users, the behavioral data stream dries up and the AI model stops improving.
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