The Duolingo Incubator allowed us to scale up our course offerings quickly and efficiently. Turns out, our bet on mobile technology paid off: within a year of launch, about 80% of our learners were using Duolingo on their phones! We saw people obsessed with scrolling social media or playing addictive mobile games, and we figured we could make all that time on your phones more productive, but still fun! We created gamified mini-lessons that anyone could do on a lunch break, when they wake up, between meetings, while waiting in a long line… anytime a learner could spare a few minutes, Duolingo was ready with a lesson. When we launched our product in 2012, we quickly realized that smartphone technology could help us follow through on our mission to give everyone access to high-quality education. Here are just a few of the most exciting educational and technological advancements we’ve made in the last 10 years! Our team is made up of some of the smartest minds in education and technology, and together, we have revolutionized many aspects of online learning.

Since our launch 10 years ago, we’ve continued to test and evaluate our teaching and assessment methods to ensure our courses are free, fun, and effective-highlighted by a recent study showing how learning French or Spanish on Duolingo leads to comparable outcomes as learning at a U.S. And while we started with language learning, Duolingo has become so much more than that: we’ve developed an on-demand English proficiency test, we’ve produced award-winning podcasts, we’ve launched Duolingo ABC to help kids learn to read, and we’ve done all of this by creating content that’s both entertaining and effective.

Duolingo was built with a singular goal: to bring high-quality education to everyone on the planet by harnessing the power of technology.

Duolingo incubator 2021