There’s a team at Duolingo whose entire job it is to make the app more delightful that would benefit from more animation resources. Not every benefit of animation is so monetary. “That’s something you can put a very clear economic value on.” According to Duolingo’s last earnings report, paid Subscribers totaled 3.3 million at the end of the quarter, up 71% from the prior year’s quarter. Subscriptions rose, he says, when the company included an animated promotion inside the app. The executive described Duolingo’s subscription product, which is branded as Super Duolingo. “There’s some ways that we use animation that we can draw super clear value from,” he explained. Meese explains that the Gunner acquisition fits into the fact that Duolingo is a “very metrics-focused company.”

CEO and co-founder Luis Von Ahn has said many times that he doesn’t pay too much attention to direct competition.

And then this year we were a fair bit more proactive in terms of defining what would be the best fit for the company in terms of categories and and targets.”įor those who have followed Duolingo’s trajectory - like me, having spent over 12,000 words on the company’s arc - it’s not all that surprising that the education company’s first acquisition was not in the language learning space but instead focused on technology to make learning more easy on the eyes. Last year, however, Duolingo began hiring people to help with mergers and acquisitions.ĭuolingo’s chief business officer Bob Meese said that “prior to 2022, we were just taking a more reactive ‘wait and see’ approach. The edtech meets entertainment business has historically stayed away from acquisitions in the past, beyond its acqui-hire of Steve Ridout, the founder of an e-reader language learning tool (who then went on to build one of Duolingo’s most popular features to date, Stories). How a bot-fighting test turned into edtech’s most iconic brand, Duolingo

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