Duolingo’s acquisition of music gaming studio NextBeat for $34.5M in early August signals a bold new direction for the language-learning app. Duolingo is a highly profitable public company with a market cap of over $15B, and a business model and user experience drawing heavily from mobile gaming. Its bet on NextBeat (Duolingo’s largest acquisition yet, first gaming-specific acquisition, and a client of Naavik as it spun out of Supercell) significantly strengthens its connection to gaming, and is also its biggest step toward new markets beyond language learning. At Duolingo’s scale, its M&A moves offer a glimpse of how gamified design and consumer-grade software might redefine learning more broadly.

Understanding Duolingo’s Strategy

Duolingo has long dominated the market for language-learning apps, and it continues to grow at an incredibly impressive pace for a company of its size. Audience size and subscription conversion continue to expand notably, according to its Q2 2025 earnings report, with its DAU increasing 40% year-over-year. The bulk of Duolingo’s business comes from its two-tier subscription offering, with the remainder of bookings coming from purchases of in-app virtual currency, in-app advertising, and licensing and merchandising. 

Duolingo more or less created the entire market for mobile language learning, and as a company, it is essentially synonymous with the market as a whole. It has achieved this success over legacy language education software like Rosetta Stone by being mobile-first, eagerly embracing gamified progression and incentives (such as the famous streak), and creating network effects using the social gaming toolbook of leaderboards, leagues, PvP, and co-op play patterns, including the streak feature.

Recent changes to the design and operations of the app have made headlines, but thus far have not had a discernable negative impact on the business. CEO Luis von Ahn’s decision to replace human course creators with AI brought a sharp rebuke from the app’s audience on social media and throughout the press. 

As reports of inaccuracies from AI “teachers” began to spread, von Ahn wrote in an internal email, “We can’t wait until the technology is 100% perfect. We’d rather move with urgency and take occasional small hits on quality than move slowly and miss the moment.”

The year prior, Duolingo had been a social media darling, with charming short-form videos of its beloved owl mascot everywhere and winning Ad Age’s“Brand of the Year” award. With the audience backlash (which came to dominate the comments on each video), the company wiped its social media accounts, though it has since returned to posting.

A redesign of the in-app progression has also proven somewhat divisive as moving forward in a lesson now consumes “energy,” regardless of whether a user answers correctly; the previous “hearts” system only penalized users when they answered incorrectly. 

While a vocal group of users have railed against this change, it appears to have had a positive impact on the business, with improved daily active usage, learning time, and subscription conversions — users can earn energy by watching ads, spending gems (hard currency), or subscribing to premium plans that grant unlimited energy.

As such, Duolingo continues to see massive year-over-year growth in its core business, and it still has a lot of room to run. But these cases show it may be just starting to experience the drawbacks of its massive scale in a way it has not experienced before. 

Continuing to push growth in language education will continue to be the primary mission, but the nature of that mission is just starting to shift from unbridled, rocket-ship positivity to the challenges that come with incumbency — and arguably a near monopoly.

Growing Beyond Language Education

Duolingo began its expansion into new subject areas with math in 2022, followed by music in 2023, and chess earlier in 2025. All three subjects have been added to its flagship app, and represent diverging paths for Duolingo, with different user motivations for each subject driving different market demands.

Analyzing the dynamics of the private tutoring market can act as a proxy for user demand for subjects like math, music, and languages. In the context of this type of tutoring, math is considered an academic subject — meaning it is a required subject taught in school — while foreign languages and music are considered nonacademic, as they are often elective or extracurricular. (This, of course, varies by geography and by school.) 

Tutoring in academic subjects, unsurprisingly, makes up the bulk of the tutoring market at 63% globally, and within this group of subjects, math may be the one with the highest demand. Tutor.com (part of The Princeton Review) reports that “math topics account for roughly half of all tutoring sessions delivered. Over the course of the company’s 23 years and nearly 25 million tutoring sessions, math has long been Tutor.com’s most-requested subject.” Math is viewed as an essential subject that many people struggle with, leading to a high demand for education services in math, a demand Duolingo seeks to fill. 

Music, on the other hand, has an entirely different set of motivations for learning, which shapes the nature of user demand. Many parents want their children to learn a musical instrument for social reasons or for personal development, while adults often pursue it as a hobby for personal fulfillment. 

Pew Research found that “54% of all U.S. parents (and 62% of parents who earn $75,000 or more per year) sign their kids up for art and music lessons,” while Gallup reported “seven out of ten people expressed a desire to learn to play a musical instrument. And another 85% of those who don't currently play an instrument wished they had learned to play.” While learning music is seen as less of a necessity than learning math, people are often more intrinsically motivated to learn music for personal or social interests. 

Duolingo can serve both audiences. It began referring to itself as “a general education company” or “an education platform” — with languages still the flagship — in late 2022 and throughout 2023, and, as such, can provide education to learners of all motivations. The trick will be to tailor its approach to such vastly different subjects — and this is where the acquisition of a subject matter company (music, in this case) such as NextBeat comes into play. 

The NextBeat Acquisition

Duolingo’s acquisition of NextBeat and its 23 staffers marks its largest acquisition yet by headcount and its first outside its core language product; it completed two previous talent-driven acquisitions in 2022 and 2024 of smaller design and animation studios that were already supporting its content development.

The story of the latest acquisition, and NextBeat’s history prior to it, is a tale that ties together mobile giants like Supercell and Duolingo and spans multiple game genres, beginning with the founding of London-based mobile studio Space Ape Games in 2012. 

Originally developers specializing in the “build-and-battle” genre with titles like Samurai Siege (a game very similar to Clash of Clans) and Transformers: Earth Wars, Space Ape had expanded to eight game teams by 2017, when Supercell acquired 62% of the studio for $56M at a $90M valuation. The studio began expanding into several other genres, and in 2016, started developing Beatstar, which was initially conceptualized as a music-themed RPG before evolving into a Guitar Hero-like beat-tapping gameplay.

Beatstar released in 2021 after five years of development, and Supercell upped its stake in Space Ape to 75% in 2022. In 2023, Space Ape launched Country Star, a genre-focused version of Beatstar. The next year, Supercell purchased all of Space Ape with the intent of “effectively establish[ing] a new office in central London” and “find[ing] our place within London’s incredibly talented games ecosystem,” which was perhaps an orientation toward talent acquisition as well as the studio’s games themselves. 

Indeed, within a few months, Space Ape’s former live games had been spun out into two independent studios: Offroad Games, which took over automotive-themed titles Chrome Valley Customs and Fastlane: Road to Revenge, and NextBeat, which inherited Beatstar and Country Star. Now with Duolingo’s acquisition of NextBeat, those music games are scheduled to be shut down in October 2025. 

With the closure of NextBeat’s own music games, its London-based team of 23 will be focusing on Duolingo’s internal music products. What might we now expect from Duolingo’s product?

For one, more (and fresher) popular music inside lessons: Duolingo had already announced a partnership with Sony Music to license its catalog, but NextBeat’s experience in this area should bring a faster and wider cadence of chart tracks and artist tie-ins. Think seasonal drops, challenges around artist releases, and rotating playlists.

Tighter, hyper-responsive core gameplay was also a hallmark of the Beatstar experience and may make its way into Duolingo as well, which is important in music, where split-second timing and input control are key. And it's likely the meta gameplay (progression, live ops, rewards, etc.) will become even more effectively gamified, thanks to the infusion of NextBeat’s skills on top of Duolingo’s already magnificent model. 

Music Education and Gaming

Naavik has previously covered the dynamics of the music gaming market, and Duolingo is not the first company to try bridging the gap between gaming and music education. Ubisoft’s Rocksmith was pitched as a version of Guitar Hero when it launched in 2011, where players would actually learn music, and it continues to this day as a cross-platform subscription on consoles, PC, and mobile that supports guitar and piano/keyboard education. 

Its performance has not been stellar, with a peak Steam CCU of just 196 in 2024 (the original, pre-subscription Rocksmith peaked at 1.4K) and a 7K average DAU in the last 30 days on mobile, according to Sensor Tower. Other mobile-first apps like Skoove, Flowkey, SimplyGuitar, SimplyPiano, and Yousician address the music education market with varying degrees of success.

But Duolingo’s brand name, existing audience, and expertise in combining gamification and social layers into a truly excellent product means the market is Duolingo’s for the taking. Just as it completely defined and dominated what mobile language education was, it may do the same for the moribund music education app market. 

Gaming’s Importance to Education Software

Duolingo’s expansion beyond languages into music, math, and even chess signals a broader reimagining of how people might approach self-directed learning in the future. Its music course hints at how hobbies that require structured practice can be gamified, while the runaway success of its chess course (its fastest growing subject ever) shows how quickly learners will embrace subjects framed with playful design and accessible feedback loops. 

While Duolingo is unique in its scale and brand, it is not alone: Startups like Linus (founded by Naavik alum Niko Vuori) and Legends of Learning are beginning to apply similar approaches to domains such as test preparation and middle- and high-school coursework.

Taken together, these developments suggest the possibility of a new wave in education technology where gaming expertise, AI-driven personalization, and bite-sized practice sessions converge to make once-daunting subjects feel approachable and even addictive. If Duolingo’s evolution is any indication, the future of learning software may look less like a digital textbook and more like a game that learners don’t want to put down.

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Duolingo’s Gaming Acquisition, Beatstar, And a New Guitar Hero? (GXM Podcast): “Mat and Tom regroup to cover a mountain of music and gaming stories! We discuss the never-ending hype around the Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 soundtrack, Duolingo’s acquisition of Nextbeat and what this means for the rhythm games Beatstar and Country Star, and why the new RedOctane Games studio could deliver the guitar rhythm game fans have been waiting for since Rock Star and Guitar Hero.”

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