Duolingo Launches Duo TV: Its First Fully In-House Animated Series

Duolingo will premiere the first two episodes of Duo TV, its first animated series created entirely in-house, on October 12 on its official YouTube channel and Instagram page. The six-episode run follows daily until the finale and stars the app's own characters: Duo the owl, the deadpan goth teen Lily, her best friend Zari, and a grumpy bear named Falstaff, all working at a mysterious grocery store called DuoMart.

The move marks a shift for the language-learning company. After years of building a massive social media audience around its characters, Duolingo is now converting that attention into studio-quality entertainment produced by its own design shop—effectively building its own entertainment arm.

How big is the character business?

Duo's fanbase currently stands at 5.3 million Instagram followers, 6.94 million YouTube followers, and 18.2 million TikTok followers. In 2024, CEO Luis von Ahn estimated the owl's value at "hundreds of millions of dollars" and said roughly 15% of new users come to the app via organic social media.

Duolingo's senior director of brand marketing, Katherine Chan, told Fast Company in late 2024 that the company aimed to make Duo "more famous than Mickey Mouse."

The bet extends beyond marketing. Characters now anchor in-product features: Lily voices the AI-powered Video Call speaking function, while Lucy, Bea, and Zari host interactive mini podcasts on DuoRadio. Duo himself has driven in-app engagement through stunts including a "dead Duo" app icon update—he later came back to life.

What's behind the in-house production push?

Duolingo has funneled significant resources into design. The company says its design team has more than tripled since 2021, growing an average of about 30% per year over the past five years, to an estimated current head count of around 150 employees. It has also acquired the animation studio Gunner, the motion design team Hobbes, and, this August, the animation studio Animade.

"Design at Duolingo is the second largest function in the entire company, only behind engineering, which is very atypical of a tech company," says Miguel Reyes, Duolingo's head of design.

"We tell everyone right from the get-go, we want to be a hundred-year business," Reyes says. The brand believes that kind of longevity requires more than an Android and iOS app.

Did the characters already prove their audience?

Yes—repeatedly. In 2024, Duolingo launched its first webcomic miniseries, Duo Unleashed!, with Webtoon, following Duo as he hires an assistant and accidentally creates an army of clones. It generated 3.5 million impressions across organic owned socials.

In 2025, the company followed with a five-episode anime series made with the L.A.-based studio Titmouse, in which Lily, Zari, and Falstaff compete as beta testers for Duo's app. It amassed 117.1 million impressions.

Sarah Beth Morgan, Duolingo's associate creative director, says the Webtoon and anime projects proved a major audience appetite for character lore. Duo TV pulls that curtain back further.

How did Duolingo pick the show's style?

With A/B testing, the same method it uses across the product. The team produced two short animated clips with identical content and plot—one in a realistic 3D style, one hand-drawn 2D—and posted both to YouTube. The 2D version drew almost double the engagement of its 3D counterpart, so 2D won.

"This whole process was from the ground up, so we were kind of finding our feet on, 'Okay, when do we write the script? Do we create the style at the same time as we're writing the script?'" Morgan recalls. "There was a lot of figuring it out as we went."

The series mimics a classic Saturday morning cartoon: short, high-tempo episodes with standalone plots tied into a broader arc. All eight and a half minutes of content were made with frame-by-frame digital animation. The team drew visual cues from The Cartoon Cartoon Show, Ed, Edd n Eddy, and the sakuga style from anime.

"A bunch of us are millennials," Morgan says. "We grew up waking up early on Saturday before our parents were awake and going to watch Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon. That was a huge inspiration, just that whole general era."

The premise builds on a highly successful pop-up Duolingo hosted last year in Tokyo's Shibuya district, staffed by giant versions of Duo and Lily and selling exclusive themed merch.

Why does this matter for the business?

The series is nostalgia-dense and meme-ready—built for recirculation by an audience of more than 30 million across platforms. More strategically, it signals Duolingo's transition from a social-media-native brand into a producer of entertainment in its own right.

"We want to be known as a healthy tech brand and just a brand that's good for the world," Reyes says. "And I think the way people do that is feeling connected to characters and connected to something bigger than just an app."