Duolingo hires its First CFO and General Counsel

Duolingo, the world's most used language-learning platform, today announced the appointments of Matt Skaruppa as the company's first Chief Financial Officer and Stephen Chen as its first General Counsel.

Its been a great year for the company. Duolingo readched one million paid subscribers for its Duolingo Plus subscription product in March 2020, and Duolingo was the top-grossing education app worldwide in 2019. In December 2019, the company was valued at $1.5 billion, becoming Pittsburgh's first venture capital-backed startup unicorn.

Skaruppa comes to Duolingo with more than 15 years of finance and operations experience, most recently as a senior member of Goldman Sachs Investment Partners. Prior to that, he spent five years as an operating executive for KKR Capstone.

Chen brings more than 20 years of experience as an attorney at publicly-traded companies including Yahoo!, VMWare and most recently Proofpoint, where he was Associate General Counsel.

"As our business has grown significantly, we are very fortunate to have Matt and Stephen join the team as we prepare for our next phases of business growth and a 50% increase in our team headcount this year." Luis von Ahn, CEO and co-founder of Duolingo, said in a statement.