A couple of years ago I recommended that all of my teacher friends invest in the Duolingo IPO, as I thought the company’s little-known English test would hit the mainstream in four or five years. Sadly, the cat is out of the bag on that front at this point.
Anyway, there are a few fun details about the Duolingo English Test to be found in their IPO documents, filed with the SEC just a few days ago. Here’s what caught my eye:
- In 2020, the test was taken about 344,000 times for about 15 million dollars in revenue.
- In 2020, 10% of the company’s revenue came from the test. That reached 11 for the beginning of 2021.
- The company hopes to extend the test to the immigration and workforce testing sectors.
- Duolingo, as a company, lost 15.8 million dollars in 2020. I can only imagine how frustrated ETS feels having to compete with a company that doesn’t really need to make money.
- Duolingo expects schools to continue accepting the test after the pandemic ends.