Ioanna Tokmakidou

Duolingo

Duolingo is the world's most popular way to learn a language. Our mission is to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available. Founded in 2011 by Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker, Duolingo is the most downloaded education app in the history of the App Store and in 2019 became the top-grossing education app worldwide. The app has been awarded Apple's iPhone App of the Year and Android's Best of the Best. Learning a new language used to be expensive; we believe it should be free. Over 1.2 billion people are learning a second language and most of them are learning English to improve their lives. Learning a new language is hard; we believe it can be fun. We use bite-sized lessons that feel like playing a game to keep our learners motivated. With over 500 million learners we have unprecedented data insights on how people learn. Our teams of language learning scientists, machine learning engineers, and AI experts use this data to constantly improve our effectiveness. We're building a future in which the highest-quality education is accessible to all. Duolingo has raised US $138 million from investors including Union Square Ventures, Capital G (formerly Google Capital), NewView Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Drive Capital, Ashton Kutcher and Tim Ferriss. Duolingo has been named to: Forbes' "Next Billion Dollar Startups" (2019), CNBC's Disruptor 50 (2018, 2019), Fortune's "Change the World" list (2019), TIME Magazine's Genius Companies (2018), Fast Company's "Most Innovative Companies" (2017, 2018, 2020), Inc.'s "Best Places to Work" (2018), Entrepreneur's "Top Company Cultures" (2018). For New Grads and Interns: http://university.duolingo.com