Duolingo, Inc.

Good day and welcome to the Duolingo first quarter 2022 earnings call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need any assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. In consideration of time, please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up question. If you have further questions, 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 to Duolingo's first quarter 2022 earnings call. Today, after market close, we released a shareholder letter with our Q1 results and commentary, which you can find on our IR website at investors.duolingo.com. Today's call will be led by Luis Van On, our co-founder and CEO, Matt Scaruba, our 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, during this call, we'll make forward-looking statements regarding future events and our financial performance. which are subject to material risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Some of these risks have been set forth in the risk factors of our periodic reports filed with the SEC. 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 will 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 consider all measures when analyzing our performance. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Luis.

Thank you, Debbie, and welcome, everyone. As usual, I want to kick off the call by reminding you of our mission, which is to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available. We work to achieve this mission by continually innovating and improving our products so that they are fun and effective. Now onto our first quarter results. Since our shareholder letter contains an in-depth discussion of this quarter's performance, Matt and I will provide some brief remarks and then get right into Q&A. Q1 of 2022 was our best quarter yet. We achieved new highs on nearly every metric. In fact, we surpassed our own performance expectations, which led us to raise our full year guidance. We are now projecting full-year bookings growth well above 30% and also expect to be profitable for the year on an adjusted EBITDA basis. The reason behind this stellar performance is clear. Our product focus strategy is working. Thousands of A-B tests that we run to make our products better are materializing in the form of stronger word-of-mouth user growth, stronger paying subscriber conversion rates, and higher overall retention. Our user growth accelerated from the previous quarter. We converted a record number of new paid subscribers, and we retained more of our previous subscribers. All of this resulted in total bookings growth of 55% this quarter compared to Q1 of last year. And now, Matt will discuss our updated outlook for 2022.