The Tech Wizard

Know those annoying CAPTCHA tests you have to do when creating online accounts? Luis von Ahn invented them. Now, he wants to see Swahili spoken around the world.

- Peter Lykke Lind

Luis von Ahn looks like a tech-guru who has made millions – casually-dressed, subtle and polite. 

I meet the inventor and CEO of the world’s largest language app, Duolingo, the day before the launch of the app’s first African language, Swahili.

For Von Ahn, the road to introducing Swahili to the 150 million users of his educational language app has been long, and has taken him around the world since leaving his homeland Guatemala.

A son of two medical doctors, graduating from Guatemala City’s international school, Von Ahn had to look outside the Central American country to find education – a university that offered math degrees – perhaps inspiring him to create a universal educational tool later in life.

During the first year of his PhD studies at the prestigious Duke University in the United States, a particular talk would influence and shape his life.

“The chief scientist of Yahoo came to give a talk about 10 things they needed solutions for. They struggled with people creating Yahoo email accounts to send spam. That led me to do a test recognizing humans: CAPTCHA. We were online within six months,” says Von Ahn.

This stroke of genius did not make Von Ahn a dime, he says.

“I don´t regret it, because everyone started using it; all kinds of people started approaching me.”

As tech giants lined up to court the CAPTCHA inventor, then 29-year-old Von Ahn was thinking about his next step.

“Two hundred million CAPTCHAs were typed a