Meet the top 100 business visionaries creating value for the world

50. Luis Von Ahn and Severin Hacker

Cofounder; CEO (Ahn) and CTO (Hacker), Duolingo

Guatemalan-born Luis von Ahn and Swiss-born Severin Hacker came together as a team at Carnegie Mellon. Von Ahn, a computer science professor at the university, and Hacker, a Ph.D. student of his, came up with the idea for Duolingo in 2009 while they were translating web pages from English to other languages — a task that proved difficult and frustrating. So they decided to make a game out of it, and Duolingo, an interactive learning game for the smartphone or computer that makes life easier for the 1.2 billion people in the world trying to learn a new language, was born.

Duolingo launched in 2011 and now has over 120 million total users worldwide, capturing the interest of investors, who last year valued the company at $470 million. The company offers nearly 60 language courses, ranging from Spanish and French to Welsh and Ukrainian. The company also created a platform tailored to schools, which has registered more than 100,000 teachers so far.

Most recently, von Ahn and Hacker have created a 20-minute English proficiency certification test, which at $50 — one-quarter of the cost of comparable tests on the market — could be a game-changer for people in developing countries looking to cash in on their English language skills.