(BFM Stock Exchange) – The most downloaded language learning application in the world has increased by more than 150% over a year. Duolingo even has a quintuplet of value since its IPO in 2021. Is this dazzling increase a simple straw fire?

“Minä oln velho” or in French, “I am a magician”. If you have desperately tried to learn Finnish with the application of Duolingo languages, this somewhat strange sentence surely evokes something.

You are not alone in having tried to learn one or more idioms with this language application, accompanied in your fun or tortuous journey of the famous Duo mascot, representing a green owl. Or a owl, for others, the debate is still open to Reddit.

Since 2012, the company offers with its application to learn common languages ​​such as English, Spanish, Italian, German, Korean, Italian or Chinese. Or more confidential such as Navajo, Amerindian language, even fictitious such as the Klingon, the flagship dialect of extraterrestrials from the Kronos planet in the Star Trek series. Or the Haut Valyrien, the imaginary language of the series of books “The Iron Throne”, better known as “Game of Thrones”.

“Many people talk about education as a way to establish equality between different social classes,” his co-founder and CEO Luis von Ahn told Bloomberg in 2023.

“But I have always thought that what is happening in practice, especially in the poor countries or regions, is that people who have money can offer themselves a very good education and therefore continue to have a lot of money,” continued the manager at the origin of the (time -consuming) Captcha verification system, which makes it possible to check that the human behind the screen is not a robot.

Duolingo’s economic model is based on a “Freemium” model, with the basic features that are available free of charge to users, which cohabits paid subscriptions.

The accessibility of Duolingo allowed him to rise fairly quickly in the world’s first place in language learning applications, claiming more than 40 million daily users, and almost 100 million in monthly data. In 2021, they were only 40.5 million monthly users.

With his short and interactive lessons, Luis von Ahn was in heart that this learning was as fun as possible. “Our free lessons, more like a game than a manual, and it is wanted: it is easier to learn while having fun.”, Is it indicated on the Duolingo website.

“Gamification” and IA

Duolingo’s learning method is indeed based on “gamification”. The user accumulates points as they go, which allows him to progress and reach the following levels. And even to unlock treasures by taking on timid challenges. Like a video game. This application has turned into a real daily ritual, dotted with “Streams”, which correspond to a series of consecutive learning days.

Duolingo has widened the learning field to fairly diverse disciplines such as mathematics, failures, or music. The application has also grown over the years of paid and increasingly sophisticated features.

Its leader counts in particular on features based on artificial intelligence (AI) to capture and seduce new users. Its premium “Super Duolingo” subscription, proposes for example to interact with the iconic characters of the application in realistic scenarios, and to provide the user with in -depth and personalized grammatical explanations.

“In the next five years, we will become as efficient as an individual linguistic tutor,” predicted Luis von Ahn in Bloomberg. Two years after these statements, the company has launched its greatest update in its history to offer additional content to its users.

The company now offers 148 new courses that it has developed with the help of the generative AI, more than double its foreign language courses for non-English speakers in the space of a year.

“It took us about 12 years to develop our first 100 courses,” said Luis Von Ahn, in the press release announcing this historic update. “With the help of AI, we are able to create new content that can improve the way people learn on a scale and a speed that we have never seen before,” he added.

The day after this historic update, the company unveiled a 2025 stratospheric financial year, even paying the luxury of raising its turnover forecasts for the current year.

“The first quarter was an exceptional start to the year – we added more daily active users this quarter than ever in our history, highlighting the continuous strength of our product and our brand,” said Luis von Ahn.

“We have also exceeded 10 million paying subscribers and recorded growth of 38% of our turnover from one year to the next, thanks to the dynamism of users and the increased adoption of our premium subscriptions,” he added.

On May 2, the day after this publication, the action flew by 21.60%. This brings its earnings to almost 55% since the start of the year and the title to more than $ 500 per unit. Over a year, it even has been torched by more than 150% and has been a quintuplet of value since its IPO in July 2021 on the NASDAQ to a course of $ 102 per share.

It must be said that Duolingo’s growth is dizzying. In 2024, Duolingo achieved a turnover of nearly 750 million euros, while in 2020, the group made revenues of $ 162 million, according to the annual report transmitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the American stock market gendarme.

For 2025, the company plans to reach a turnover bordering on a billion dollars, expecting more precisely that its income is between 987 and $ 996 million.

A stock market nugget?

How far will the irresistible stock market ascension go accelerated last August when the company announced that it had crossed the course of 100 million active monthly users? Does the market see in Duolingo the future star of Wall Street, which can steal the show from the Gafam the American tech giants, which are in bad shape with the uncertainties caused by customs duties.

“The valuation of Duolingo is too high. It is too expensive,” said Charles Monot, president of Monocle Asset Management in the BFM Stock Exchange of April 30, the day before the group’s quarterly publication.

“During yesterday closing (April 29, Duolingo displayed a capitalization of $ 17 billion for 10 billion paying users. This is 1,700 dollars for a user who pays $ 7 per month, it seems a lot,” he said.

The market specialist has taken as a comparison, the Spotify listening platform. “However, a Spotify subscriber is valued 350 dollars today – and the action has doubled in a year so it’s anything but cheap Spotify!”, He recalled.

Should we turn away from Duolingo on the stock market with regard to this demanding valuation? “Luis von Ahn is an extraordinary type. When you have one like that – a gates, a job, a musk, there are things in their heads that we do not see in the figures. In 2005, we could do pretty calculations on the iMac and the iPod. He just lacked the iPhone which was going to arrive two years later and spray all these calculations. market specialist.

So what is the potential of value? The average course objective of analysts compiled by Investing.com exteriorizes a drop -down potential of almost 11% on the value (447.87 dollars) compared to the current course (503.57 dollars in May 8), with 14 of the 23 analysts covering the value for “purchase”, when nine are to “keep”

Among the most optimistic analysts, JPMorgan, who renewed his recommendation at the start of the week to “overlap”, and his lens of 500 dollars on Duolingo.

Cités by Investing.com, analysts from the American bank have underlined the development potential of language learning application with strong growth in the number of users in the coming years.

For specialists from the American bank, history is far from completed. They recall that the 130 million current active active users of Duolingo represent only in the end only a limited part of the global market for language learning, that is to say 18% of the global market for online language learning and 7% of the total population of language learners. This implies, according to them, a significant growth reservoir for Duolingo.