Freshly IPO’d ed-tech company, Duolingo, made a running start into public life yesterday, even as investors struggle with a choppy market.
Duolingo, the quirky little language learning app with an idiosyncratic yet frightening green mascot, has had a dream start to public life.
Show me Duolingo’s numbers
Having settled on an offering of 3.7 million shares at $102 apiece, Duolingo ended its first trading day on the Nasdaq at $139.01 per share — up more than 36%. By the end of the day, Duolingo raised nearly $521 million in the IPO by selling about 5.1 million shares, giving it a valuation of $6.5 billion.
But before you go diving in, pressing that big red BUY button like some sort of lunatic, let’s take a look at some of the numbers behind the numbers.
- Duolingo claims its app has been downloaded 500 million times.
- Has 40 million monthly active users as of March 31, 2021 — up 101% YoY.
- Revenue increased 129% from $70.8 million in 2019 to $161.7 million in 2020.
There are, of course, some bearish points, such as the fact that in Q1 of this year, Duolingo had net losses of $13.5 million, significantly higher than the $2.2 million loss it generated in the same period of 2020. Meanwhile, from 2019 to 2020, the company’s GAAP net losses expanded from $13.6 million to $15.8 million as it spent heavily on marketing.
That aside, it is by far the most popular method of language learning for a mass consumer audience, suffering few rivals to its 95 courses across 40 distinct languages.
CEO and co-founder Luis von Ahn claims it is “the most popular way to learn languages in the world.” And with more than nine times as many searches for “Duolingo” as for the phrase “learn Spanish” on Google, I believe him.
If you want to read more about Duolingo’s financials, read our free blog post here.
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