Owen Kovacs ‘26 pitched Duolingo (NASDAQ: DUOL) on November 10th, 2025. Duolingo is a leading education technology company specializing in gamified language learning. The company operates a freemium business model while integrating AI into premium subscription offerings and expanding into new subjects such as literacy, math, music, and most recently, chess.
Owen’s investment thesis revolved around 4 main segments. First, Duolingo has a substantial total addressable market with an estimated 2bn people learning a language and total spending expected to reach $123bn by 2027, positioning Duolingo at the center of a massive and still underpenetrated market. Next, Duolingo has consistently been the top grossing education app on the App Store and Google Play with over 500 million downloads and 135 million monthly active users giving the company the largest proprietary language-learning dataset in the world. This scale advantage drives network effects, product feedback loops, and long-term competitive durability. Third, Duolingo’s partnership with OpenAI to integrate GPT-4 into its premium subscription plans has helped drive monetization of its free user base. The application of large language models has allowed Duolingo to produce 4-5x more content with the same number of people. Lastly, Duolingo’s capital-light, software-driven business model enables strong unit economics with high gross margins and declining content creation costs due to AI.
SMIF voted to purchase approximately $36,000 of DUOL, funded by the sale of HON.
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