Founder and CEO Duolingo

Louis Von Ahn the Co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, was the professor of computer Science at the Carnegie Melon University. Having born and brought up in Guatemala, he closely observed and experienced the difficulty of his community to access English education. This led him to believe that “free education will really change the world’’ His research in human computation has earned him international recognition and numerous honors. He rose to fame with his company reCAPTCHA which he sold to Google in 2019. Awards and recognitions poured in and he was named among the 50 most influential people in the world; and one of the 50 best brains in the world.

Alongside his work on crowdsourcing and human computation, he worked towards realizing his vision of evolving a freemium model of language learning. In 2009, Von Ahn and his graduate student Severin Hacker began to develop Duolingo, a language education platform. They founded a company of the same name in 2012. And, the company is now worth $1.5 billion.