In 2012, Severin and his mentor launched the app publicly as a free, science-based language education platform and since then, it has grown to be the most popular way to learn languages online. Over 1 million people viewed his talk and more than 300,000 signed up for the beta as a result. In that same year Luis was invited to give a TED talk where he spoke about massive-scale online collaboration and introduced the idea of Duolingo. They decided to call it Duolingo, deriving from the Latin words “duo” which means “two” and “lingua”, meaning “tongue” or “language”. In 2011, the two designed a private beta version of their language-learning app for which people could sign up. Their message was clear: they wanted their product to be accessible to everybody and to be completely free of charge. Luis and Severin set out to revolutionise language education by making it free. Unfortunately, learning languages costs money and many scholars are short of that. Their reason is often to either get a job in the first place or a better position within their company.
Over 1.2 billion people are currently learning a new language, and 800 million of them are studying English. They knew they wanted to work on something related to education and because demand for language learning is huge, they decided to settle on that.
It all started out as an academic project at Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania between Luis and his PhD student Severin. In this week’s instalment, we are featuring Duolingo, the app that revolutionised language learning.īrand: Duolingo Industry: language-learning Products: language learning app Founder: Luis von Ahn, Severin Hacker Year Founded: 2011 Mission: Gamification poured into every lesson. Brands that do an exceptionally good job at telling their stories are the stars of our Brand Story Hero series.
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