Duolingo vs StepFun

Duolingo — Application · Public · $7.3B mkt cap · 4 of 4 figures sourced  |  StepFun — Foundation Models · Private · $10B valuation · 2 of 2 figures sourced

Relationship

Duolingo English Test and 阶跃AI (StepFun AI) do comparable work on speech to text; both also serve buyers who need to turn speech into text; similar scale (private).

Assembled from the recorded fields for this pair, not hand-checked. The comparison below is read from each company’s own profile.

3 of 4 capabilitiesShared product type

3 of 4 capabilities — Shares speech to text, text generation and voice agent.

Ludbee capability tags · from the product records

Shared product type — Both ship application.

Ludbee product records

Aligned comparison

FieldDuolingoStepFun
Size$7.3B mkt cap$10B valuation different basis
Employees900—
Founded20112023 12 yrs later
StatusPublicPrivate
CategoryApplicationFoundation Models
Stack layerApplicationAI agent, API service, Application, Developer tool, Model API
HeadquartersPittsburgh, USAShanghai, China

Capability overlap

Shared · 3

Speech to textText generationVoice agent

Not verified for StepFun · 1

Education and tutoring

Recorded for Duolingo. StepFun’s product records say nothing either way — a missing record is not a missing capability.

Not verified for Duolingo · 9

Agent orchestrationAgentic codingCode generationImage generationModel inferenceKnowledge retrievalText to speechSearch answersWorkflow automation

Recorded for StepFun. Duolingo’s product records say nothing either way — a missing record is not a missing capability.

Products, side by side

Algorithmic pairing — assembled from recorded fields, not hand-checked

Duolingo

Application

Duolingo English TestApplication

An online English proficiency exam scored by machine learning and accepted by institutions worldwide, with results in two days.

Duolingo MaxApplication

The subscription tier where the AI features live: Video Call with an animated tutor, Roleplay conversations and Explain My Answer, sitting on top of everything Super already removes from the free course.

StepFun

Application

阶跃AI (StepFun AI)Application

StepFun's consumer AI assistant, available on the web and as Windows and macOS desktop clients, offering web search, knowledge-base Q&A, image creation, tool use and speech recognition.

No counterpart

StepFun sells these in a stack layer with no product recorded for Duolingo yet — nothing on the other side to compare them against.

API service

Step PlanAPI service

A subscription service from the StepFun Open Platform that supplies a monthly Credit pool for calling StepFun's flagship models from third-party coding tools and agent clients such as Claude Code, Cursor, OpenClaw, Cline and Zed.

AI agent

StepClawAI agent

A one-click cloud-deployed AI agent offered inside the 阶跃AI assistant that interprets instructions and carries out tasks autonomously.

Developer tool

阶跃星辰 AI Studio (StepFun AI Studio)Developer tool

A browser-based workspace for building, testing and deploying AI applications on StepFun's models, with a playground, a showcase library of example apps and a personal asset library.

Model API

StepFun Open PlatformModel API

API access to StepFun's text, vision, speech and image models, with credit packages and enterprise plans.

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