Duolingo Bets on User Growth to Outpace AI Disruption

Duolingo said Thursday (Feb. 27) that it plans to shift its focus from financial growth to user growth amid a challenge posed by artificial intelligence.

Louis von Ahn, co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, said in a Thursday earnings release that the mobile learning platform surpassed 50 million daily active users and generated over $1 billion in bookings for the first time in 2025.

“At the same time, advances in AI are fundamentally reshaping how people learn, and we believe this is a pivotal moment for our company,” von Ahn said. “In 2026, we are deliberately prioritizing user growth and teaching better. We’ll focus on improving the free learner experience to grow word of mouth and feed our next user growth engines like chess, math and music, even though that moderates near-term financial growth.”

Duolingo believes that with this strategy, it can reach 100 million daily active users in the medium-term and build a business that is larger and more durable, von Ahn said.

The company’s user growth slowed in 2025, von Ahn wrote in a shareholder letter released Thursday. While its year-over-year growth in daily active users (DAUs) was at least 40% in every quarter from the second quarter of 2022 to the second quarter of 2025, the metric slowed to 30% in the fourth quarter of 2025. Duolingo expects it to drop to about 20% in 2026, von Ahn wrote.

“Some of this deceleration is natural as we scale, and some of it, we believe, is a function of our increased focus on monetization in recent years,” von Ahn wrote. “Given the opportunity to teach billions of people and the unique time we live in, we are now making a more deliberate shift in how we operate the business to prioritize teaching better and user growth.”

Duolingo’s strategy includes teaching languages better by making its Video Call feature accessible to more users, providing more AI-powered speaking practice to both free and paid learners, and offering more advanced content around its nine most-learned languages, according to the letter.

The company also plans to improve its free user value proposition by reducing the friction it previously applied to encourage people to subscribe, boost word of mouth as a growth driver by repurposing part of its monetization team to work on user growth rather than subscription promotion, and dedicating more resources to its “next user growth engines” such as chess, math and music, per the letter.

PYMNTS reported in May 2024 that artificial intelligence is changing how companies train and upskill their employees by offering personalized learning experiences that can reduce costs and improve efficiency.

On Thursday (Feb. 27), PYMNTS reported that Anthropic research found that in education, both students and educators are developing measurable skills in how to collaborate with AI tools.

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