Duolingo's (DUOL 4.25%) stock entered 2025 on a mission, like a green owl looking for people who skipped their daily language lessons. Share prices more than tripled from early August 2024 to mid-May 2025. Duolingo made market darlings like Nvidia look slow and sleepy (sueño, schläfrig, dormema) in that period.
But the good times didn't last. As I'm writing this on Nov. 19, Duolingo's stock has fallen 67% from that lofty peak in May. Can the mobile language educator get back on its feet and take flight again, or is this crash the start of a long-term malady (enfermedad, Krankheit, malsano)? Let's see what Duolingo might be up to over the next year.
Image source: Getty Images.
Duolingo grew up while you weren't looking
The Duolingo you see today is already very different from the pure-play language educator of 2021, when the stock entered public markets. The user count is up from 37.9 million to 135.3 million. Paid subscribers surged from 1.9 million to 11.5 million. Trailing revenues stopped at $207.7 million back then. Now, Duolingo beat that figure with $271.7 million of top-line sales in Q3 2025 alone. The trailing tally is up to $964.3 million now.
And it's not just the numbers. Duolingo has also introduced an ultra-premium Max subscription for those who want to boost their learning with artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Max uses ChatGPT to analyze the questions you got wrong, and to run personalized video chats with in-game characters. If conversation is the best way to really learn a language, the Max-driven chats should significantly raise the quality of the learning experience.
Furthermore, Duolingo is expanding its learning platform to new topics. The expansion (expansión, Erweiterung, ekspansio) started with music and math lessons in 2023 or 2024, depending on what kind of device you use in your lessons. This year, Duolingo added a chess course in partnership with Chess.com.
Big dreams for a small owl
Duolingo is an innovator at heart. I expect the topic growth to continue, eventually covering pretty much anything you can learn by rote repetition -- and then moving into areas where the ChatGPT-driven Max service can go the extra mile. From history and social science to physics and economics, the target market should multiply in size (multiplicarse en tamaño, sich vermehren, pligrandiĝi) over the next decade or so. Beyond that, I can imagine a Duolingo University, fully accredited in advanced fields like electrical engineering and internal medicine.
None of that is on tap in 2026, of course. These are long-term ambitions. There may be one or two new Duolingo courses over the next year, but none of them will be game-changers right away.
Management changed their operating goals in the Q3 report, caring more about optimum user growth than monetization for the next few years. This update was the main reason why Duolingo's stock kept falling in November, despite fantastic earnings and revenue surprises in the same Q3 report.
NASDAQ: DUOL
Key Data Points
I'm buying Duolingo despite the Wall Street drama
Over the next year, I'm looking for continued innovation in the game-like learning model, coupled with heavy marketing and in-app tweaks to move more of the ad-supported users into Duolingo's premium subscriptions.
It's not a sharp U-turn in Duolingo's strategy-setting offices. It's just a "balance shift" within Duolingo's current business model, prioritizing a different set of goals with a negligible impact on management's full-year revenue guidance. Current challenges include other companies' AI-driven language learning, regulatory pressure around Duolingo's rapidly growing Chinese user group, and perhaps a rougher strategy shift than expected. But Duolingo is poised to tackle these issues, led by a certified genius and equipped with skyrocketing growth engines.
So there's a two-player mode in the chess course now, and a handful of popular languages have a new flashcard exercise in the training section. Duolingo's marketing strategy should be more about user growth than money-making for a while. That's all good with me, and I think the stock is an excellent buy after that steep price drop. It's still a long-term winner, even if the next year looks like a wide-open share-buying window.
And now it's time for some Spanish, German, and Esperanto classes. I have a 3,433-day streak (racha, Strähne, serio) of daily lessons to maintain, after all.
