Duolingo (DUOL -3.26%) was founded by Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker at Carnegie Mellon University in 2011 with the mission of making high-quality language education free and accessible to everyone. Before Duolingo, von Ahn had invented reCAPTCHA, which was sold to Alphabet’s (GOOGL +1.48%) (GOOG +1.40%) Google in 2009.
Duolingo’s original crowdsourced translation business was eventually abandoned because computer translation became more efficient, and human-translated data was inconsistent. The company shifted its focus to serving a global audience of language learners with a freemium model and developing in-house content, a model that has proved more sustainable and profitable over the years.
