Literacy rates have steadily risen around the world over the last decade, according to a 2025 UNESCO report—important progress on a key UN Sustainable Development Goal, as the ability to read, write, and use numbers is “crucial for thinking critically and navigating information-rich society and economy in a safe, effective and responsible manner.” Access to digital learning has largely been associated with higher test scores for students globally. As technology continues to advance, tech companies have pounced upon the opportunity to bring education systems around the world up to speed with the ever-more connected digital world and the proliferation of new tools like generative AI.
To assess the top EdTech companies in the world, TIME partnered with Statista on a data-based research project evaluating the thousands of companies in the space on strong financial performance and industry impact. The end result is a list of the 500 top-performing companies in education technology.
Methodology: How TIME and Statista Determined the World’s Top EdTech Companies of 2026
The top ranked company on the list is Duolingo, which was also the top-ranked EdTech company in the U.S. this year. The company, which started as a language learning app, has expanded into math, chess, and music. Duolingo now has over 60 million daily active users and generated more than $1 billion in bookings last year. As UNESCO advocates for more multilingualism, which can offer social, cognitive, and economic benefits, Duolingo’s chief product officer, Cem Kansu, believes that there are still more language learners the app has yet to reach. Roughly 20% of Duolingo’s users are in the U.S., with the majority distributed globally and Asia as one of their fastest growing regions recently. “Asia for English learning especially is a huge market,” Kansu says. Around half of Duolingo’s users are under 21, and use the app as an educational supplement—a lesser known product called Duolingo For Classrooms is designed specifically for teachers to assign Duolingo lessons as homework for students.
Duolingo stands out among other language learning tools with engaging designs that motivate users to return and practice every day (more than 15 million users have a streak longer than one year); micro-lessons that use implicit learning rather than drilling grammar rules; and keeping its free tier to bring in new users.
“It is extremely important that we provide a very extensive free user experience because Duolingo was built around the idea of providing access to education,” says Kansu. “If someone that had to immigrate from Syria to Turkey had to learn Turkish to integrate, we want to provide access to them. On top of that, an excellent free product provides an amazing growth flywheel for Duolingo.”
Word of mouth has certainly made Duolingo mainstream, but the company broke through the noise through its unconventional marketing tactics and its capitalization on cultural moments like the World Cup (daily learners studying Norwegian on Duolingo were up nearly 19% globally and 24% in the U.S. compared with the previous month), shows like Squid Game (Season 1 of Squid Game drove a 40% increase in new U.S. Korean learners on Duolingo immediately after its premiere), and Bad Bunny performing in the Super Bowl halftime show (engagement with Spanish jumped 35% the week after).
While platforms like Duolingo are driving interest in learning and lowering the barrier for entry globally, in the U.S., where there appears to be a “learning recession” as standardized scores for math and reading drop, there are rising concerns about the use of technology in classrooms and too much screen time for children.
Emily Weinstein, a researcher at the Center for Digital Thriving at Harvard, says some students are using up to seven different apps to manage everything from grades to sports team schedules. Kids have reported feeling constantly tethered to these tools to monitor the “endless stream of notifications about what they’re supposed to know and do,” which can add to the academic pressures they’re already experiencing, Weinstein says. Educators have also told her that these tools often arrive without the necessary onboarding.
“Whenever you’re thinking about technology in education, you should really think about it like a three-legged stool. You have the actual technology, you have the person using it, and then you have the place where they’re using it,” says Stephen AguiIar, an associate professor at the USC Rossier School of Education. “In an ideal world, the technology works, the person knows how to use it, and it’s used in the place where it’s helpful or where it actually makes a difference.
I think a lot of the backlash is about poor fit, where you have AI or EdTech companies entering a space they frankly know very little about, and then you have backlash from people who see things just not working. And what’s a little unfortunate is that it doesn’t always have anything to do with the core technology.”
A central problem is that educational institutions in the U.S. have been underfunded for decades, which creates strains in the system. “Whenever you put a system in strain, one of the things that happens is administrators rightly look for ways to cut costs and to become more efficient, even though education isn’t an efficient enterprise,” says Aguilar. “Education is not this thing where you drop off your kids, they sit there for a little bit, knowledge gets poured into them, and then they come out a little smarter. That’s the business way of looking at it, and it is fundamentally incorrect. Companies that do a little bit of a better job, they’re really thinking about what teachers need to execute their work better.”
As some AI tools fuel the proliferation of digital cheating, there’s a reckoning that’s happening among educators about how they’re evaluating and assessing learning through traditional assignments, papers and homework, as well as how they’re teaching, experts say. Some leading EdTech platforms like Canvas-owner Instructure (no. 45) and Inspera (no. 31) have rolled out tools to deter AI cheating, including resources to help instructors understand the culture around cheating and how to change their focus from catching students cheating to creating an environment that encourages academic integrity.
“The systemic issue is we don’t have a sense of trust and integrity around the work, then we’re trying to layer on EdTech as a solution, and kids are finding ways around it because they’re missing the core thing that is going to give them pride in the work,” says Weinstein. “One of the things that we collectively need is to use this AI moment to have conversations in our classroom and school communities about what the purpose of learning is.”
From her research, Weinstein has found that listening more to student perspectives could fundamentally change how we understand what it looks and feels like to be a student in this context, and how these different technologies are shaping learning trajectories. “When you’re talking to a young person, you can suddenly see that their good intentions are not always enough in a context where the market forces and design features are pulling them this way and that,” she says. “When I sit down with a kid and look at their ChatGPT logs, I can see such a difference in when they have turned to an EdTech tool for learning and when they have turned to it for a grade.”
Duolingo’s Kansu says that even though Duolingo For Schools’ dashboard for teachers had fairly good adoption, designing products for schools is not easy. “What we’re realizing is if we just continue teaching better, Duolingo will become a great complement to classrooms anyway,” he says. “I’m hoping that Duolingo is always put in a bucket of good screen time…Meaning, any minute you spend on Duolingo, you are doing something good for yourself. Any fun minute you spend is also of extremely high learning value.”
Rising Stars
This sub-ranking highlights companies 10 years or younger with the highest revenue growth rates over the past three years out of those who submitted company data via the online application process.
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