severin hacker

Even though there are thousands of languages in the world, English has become the main medium of communication. But still, many of the people are struggling with finding a better institute, where they can learn the language at a cheaper price.

Some people want to learn different languages as a hobby, and some need to learn a different language to get a better job. But getting admission into a good college or institution is not easy for everyone.

Thinking of this obstacle, the professor and student duo, Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker, thought of developing an online platform that could help the people around the world learn different languages for free.

Luis von Ahn is the Carnegie Mellon University professor, who is also the developer of reCAPTCHA. And, Severin Hacker was a graduate and Ahn’s student from the same university.

Ahn is a native of Guatemala, a place where the scope of getting a basic education is only 30 per cent. Ahn was a bright student and wanted to study Mathematics. But unfortunately, there were no resources for studying Maths in the whole country. But if a person is working hard, no obstacles can stop him/her from achieving their dreams. Ahn’s determination brought him to the U.S., and he joined the Duke University.

Ahn completed a BS degree in Mathematics from the university in 2000. In 2005, he received a PhD degree in Computer Science from the Carnegie Mellon University. The next year, he joined the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University as the faculty member.

Ahn is recognised for his researches on CAPTCHAs and human computation. He has won many awards for his work including acclaim as the 50 Best Brains in Science by Discover and one of the 10 Most Brilliant Scientists by Popular Science Magazine.

Severin Hacker was born in 1984 in Zug and was brought up in Zurich. He completed a B.S. from Zurich and then moved to Pittsburgh. In Pittsburgh, he joined the alumni of Carnegie Mellon University and received a PhD degree in Computer Science. Hacker met Ahn at the university, where Ahn was his graduate advisor.

Being from a place where people struggle with the English language, Ahn and Hacker wanted to create a system, that could translate the website language from English to the other languages. This way, the people who did not understand English could access the website in their own language. But the two were not convinced about this idea completely and decided to develop a program that could do two things at a time, i.e., translate sentences into foreign languages and translate simple phrases in documents.

At the time, another language teaching app, Rosetta Stone, was getting famous. But the paid subscription of the app could not get more subscribers, and it was limited to the ones who could really afford it. But as the two co-founders had come from a place that where not all were economically well, they knew that not all can afford to pay for studies. The two knew that there is a larger population that require to learn a new language, especially English, and if they get a chance, it would be great for them. This led the two co-founders to build a simple and free language learning platform Duolingo.

The two started working on Duolingo in 2009, at the time when Ahn had just sold his startup reCAPTCHA to Google. In November 2011, the two started the beta testing of their product. In the beginning, they used the approach of crowdsourced translations. This gave birth to the early premise of the company, “learn a new language while translating the web”.

A National Science Foundation grant and the Ahn’s MacArthur fellowship sponsored the project initially. Later, Duolingo raised $3.3 million investments from Union Square Ventures and actor Ashton Kutcher’s firm, A-Grade Investments in a private Series A funding.

Ahn talked about Duolingo at his TED Talk in the same year, where he got a chance to reach a bigger number of audience. Though it was not a sales pitch, Ahn talked about the broken education system in underdeveloped countries and the benefits of using Duolingo. The speech received 1 million views, and this way, 300,000 users entered the waiting list for Duolingo signup.

The next year, with much improvements, Duolingo was released for the general public, and the platform included four languages, i.e. English, Spanish, French and German.

The company reported that not only the job seekers and students but the English teachers across the world were also using Duolingo. In late 2012, the company released an iOS app for its users, and the next year, the company also launched the Duolingo Android app. The Android app became an instant hit and had over 1 million downloads within the first three weeks of its launch.

In 2013, Duolingo partnered with BuzzFeed and CNN. The company raised $15 million in series C funding. By 2017, the company had received a total $108.3 million investment.

Though the service is completely free and does not support ads. To generate a certain revenue, the company uses periodic advertising. If the users do not want to see those ads as well, they can pay a subscription fee. The platform offers support for over 25 languages and 30 different courses. On the advice of Hacker, gamification was added to the platform.

The Duoliongo app was named as the number one app on Play Store and App of the Year on Apple Store in 2013. As of 2014, Ahn is serving the company as the CEO. Hacker and Luis von Ahn received the Tech 50 award in 2015.