Duolingo shares jump after IPO

Quotes of the service of additional language education Duolingo jumped sharply after the IPO on Nasdaq, writes Bloomberg.

On the first day of trading after the placement, the company's stock quotes at their peak grew by 42%. At the same time, the final price of Duolingo's IPO turned out to be higher than the increased upper limit of the interval - $102 instead of $100, the agency writes. In total, during the placement, the company raised $521 million, and during trading, its capitalization, taking into account options and shares with limited circulation, approached $6 billion.

The know-how of a company with a decade of history - in the combination of language learning in the application with crowd-sourced translations by native speakers. Founded in Pittsburgh, USA, Carnegie Mellon University professor Louis von Ahn and his graduate student Severin Hacker will retain 15% of the vote after the placement. During the pandemic, Duolingo increased both revenue and loss: in the first quarter of this year, it showed revenue of $55 million and a loss of $13 million, in the first quarter of 2020 - $28 million and $2.2 million, respectively.

The successful IPO of an American educational company took place in the context of China's tough attack on its own services in this industry and will become a reference point for other startups, notes Techcrunch . Back in November 2020, the company was valued at $2.4 billion.