This company, based in Pittsburgh, USA, operates an app that helps users learn a language through short courses. It offers language courses in over 40 languages and has a freemium pricing model.
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Ahead of the Duolingo IPO today, take our investing short course and let us know how you get on 
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Welcome to the forum, @Swade13 
Which language are you learning?
As well as the international language of investing, of course 
Iām taking the Indonesian course 
- I speak a bit of Malay having lived out there but living in the UK now I donāt have the chance to practice it. Unfortunately there isnāt a Malay course on there but Indon is basically the same language so works for me.
A 5-10 minute a day habit built up through gamification on the app definitely helps keep you engaged.
As for the language of investing I have no knowledge at all, freetrade is just a bit of fun really.
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Buna seara - Romanian learner checking in here and a paid DuoLingo subscriber. The Romanian course isnāt great though, the language samples are syntheised speech with a lot of incorrect pronunciations and the written questions are full of oddities and errors too.
I assume the more widespread languages are better quality but it puts me off investing.
This is very true. Itās a shame, though.
For example, German is very high quality and has speaking questions/tasks. Polish doesnāt have any speaking exercises, but the voices are still pretty good. The Ukrainian course audio, though, is awful quality.
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Wow thatās a high price any one have predictions as to how much its going to come down. Iād love to invest in duolingo but not at that price
I am not a paid subscriber but I am using Duolingo fairly often to learn Danish. I will spare some change for a fraction of a share of DUOL for sure. Not sure about fundamental though.
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Numbers from 2019 ā 2020
Revenue = $78m to $161m
Users = 30m ā 42m
Losses. = $13.6m ā $15.8m
They doubled the money they brought in but still managed to lose more than the year before 
this while only adding 4 courses (not languages). Not sure where this revenue went?
My biggest concern is that theyāre trading at 31x revenue while the closest comparison I could think of, Coursera (NYSE.COUR) is trading at 14 x revenues.
There really arenāt a lot of public EdTech companies that I found who are similar enough to DuoLingo, The competition RosettaStone, Babbel & Busuu are all private. Some more analysiswould be needed before making a judgement and as always this isnāt advice and do your own research 
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Making a loss while going public, weāll done duolingo
Thanks though. My thoughts are it could go either way then as it is losing money but also has a monopoly in that they are extremely unique
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Q2 numbers include a drop in monthly and daily user but more paid subscribers. The latter being the more important metric but if the trend continues converting to free user to paid membership will only get harder.
Theyāre arenāt unique, just the best known. Michel Thomas and Babbel are out there too.
I tried Duolingo with my kids and the lessons went a really unusual way, trying to teach words that we wouldnāt need in everyday conversation. And family who are native speakers claimed a lot of lessons pronounced words wrongly (or the American way not the Italian way) or used wrong-but almost right words.
Used a free app from the school in the end and kids made much faster progress.
I wanted so much to invest in Duolingo as they are the most āout thereā app, obviously with the largest advertising budget and they are really trying to educate peopleā¦but thereās others that do a better job. So glad I waited to see what happened, saved myself a few quid.
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