Un moment de recul. A pause. A moment of stepping back. A surprisingly apt French phrase for an industry now staring at its most consequential shift in decades—and doing so most dramatically in India.

On paper, this should be Duolingo’s victory-lap year: revenue expected to cruise past $1 billion in 2025, 50 million people tapping the green-owl app every day, the whole up-and-to-the-right thing. And yet the company’s most strategically important battlefield—India—is also its messiest one. 

The market it entered nearly a decade ago, where it commands massive scale—its fifth-largest user base—but suffers microscopic conversion. Millions use it, far fewer pay for it.

Worse, a new kind of language-learning cage match is forming.

Duolingo has loudly rebrandedLinkedinAn all-hands email from CEO, Luis von Ahn itself “AI-first”, sped up course production with large language models (LLMs), and is evaluating lower priced subscription tiers. Fine. Sensible. But the pushback isn’t confined to the usual suspects anymore.

At one end are AI companies that never cared about language learning and, almost rudely, have become astonishingly good at it. At the other end are Indian platforms building culturally tuned, outcome-driven models that make gamified streaks look like children’s stickers.

In October, Perplexity’s Aravind Srinivas rolled out tools that let users practise vocab, fix pronunciation, and hold guided conversations inside the app—an AI that can shapeshift into any tone, any modality, any language. 

Carrie Wang, senior director and head of global growth at Duolingo’s english-test vertical, told The Ken that Duolingo sees “the AI shift as something as fundamental as the web-to-mobile shift.”

India, however, has a habit of making shifts behave in strange ways.

India remains a market where few pay for subscriptions, but it is the No. 1 market for the Duolingo English Test (DET), the company’s crown-jewel credential. Investors, meanwhile, seem unconvinced; the stock fell about 35% after latest earnings.

Even Indian challengers are speeding up. Unacademy’s year-old Airlearn already claims 17,500 paying users and a $2 million bookings run rate. Multibhashi pushes real-world usage over gamified dopamine hits.