Duolingo, Inc.

Good day and welcome to the Duolingo fourth quarter 2021 earnings call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After management's opening remarks, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. If you have a follow-up question, you may re-enter the question queue. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Debbie Belevin, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and welcome everyone to Duolingo's fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings call. Today, after market close, we released a shareholder letter with our results and commentary, which you can find on our IR website at investors.duolingo.com. With me on the call today are Luis Van On, co-founder and CEO, Matt Scarupa, CFO, and Bob Meese, our Chief Business Officer. We'll begin with some brief remarks before opening the call to Q&A. Just to remind everyone that during this call, we'll make forward-looking statements regarding our future events and financial performance, which are subject to material risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. We caution you to review the risk factors contained in our SEC filings. These forward-looking statements are based on assumptions that we believe to be reasonable as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. Additionally, we'll present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures on today's call. These non-GAAP measures are not intended to be considered in isolation from, a substitute for, or superior to our GAAP results, and we encourage you to reconsider all the measures when analyzing our performance. And with that, I'd now like to turn the call over to Luis.

Thank you, Debbie, and welcome everyone. We are a global company that serves learners in every country in the world. I want to start by acknowledging the horrible situation in Ukraine, saying that we stand with all those working towards peace and that our hearts are with the Ukrainian people. Since our shareholder letter contains an in-depth discussion of our performance, we'll just provide some brief remarks and then get right into Q&A. First, as I always do, I'd like to start out by reminding everyone about our mission. Since we started the company, our mission has been to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available. Everything we do is guided by this mission. We started out with languages to help reduce economic inequality, but we are expanding into other areas of education in order to touch even more people's lives. I'm very proud to say that we've made tremendous progress towards our mission, but we are just getting started. I'd also like to congratulate our entire team on the amazing performance they delivered in 2021. Not only did we take the company public, but we also delivered incredible user and subscriber growth. Our total bookings and revenue both grew by 55%. Our team continued its unwavering focus on creating quality products that are fun and effective. In 2021, we rolled out a number of new product innovations that further increased user engagement and retention and ultimately drove more conversions to our premium subscription. In fact, during the fourth quarter, we had the highest number of DAUs, MAUs, and net new subscribers ever. We also continued to build a beloved brand that is synonymous with language learning. The vast majority of our growth comes organically through word of mouth. As we move into 2022, we'll continue building upon this momentum. We're planning to introduce an entirely new design of the Duolingo app home screen that we believe will further drive user engagement. We'll continue making Duolingo more social with features that allow learners to interact with each other. We'll continue to grow acceptance of the Duolingo English test at institutions around the world. We'll refine the Duolingo ABC app with a fresh design to drive engagement and learning efficacy. And we are excited to launch a math app towards the end of the year.