# Bob Meese

> Bob Meese is a seed investor at Duolingo (Pittsburgh) backing Music and E-Learning. See 6 investments, check sizes, portfolio. Updated Aug 2026.

- Type: Angel Investor
- Fund: [Duolingo](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/duolingo)
- Location: Pittsburgh, United States
- Total investments: 6
- Last investment: May 2024
- Lead investor: 0%
- Last updated: Aug 2026
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rmeese
- X (Twitter): https://twitter.com/meese
- Website: https://x.com/meese

Bob Meese is a seed investor at Duolingo in Pittsburgh focused on Music and E-Learning. Bob Meese is the Chief Business Officer at Duolingo. Bob Meese attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

## Round sizes

| Stage | Round size |
| --- | --- |
| Seed | $1.3M–$9M |

## Investment focus

### Industry

| Industry | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Music | 2 | 33% |
| E-Learning | 2 | 33% |
| Gaming | 1 | 17% |
| Social | 1 | 17% |
| Software | 1 | 17% |

12 industries tracked in total.

### Stage

| Stage | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Seed | 4 | 67% |
| Pre-Seed | 2 | 33% |

## Investments

| Company | Description | Amount | Stage | Date | Website |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Fundamental Research Labs | Altera build digital human beings that live, love and grow. | $9M | Seed | May 08, 2024 |  |
| Titan AI | Titan AI uses generative AI to create mobile games for underserved audiences. | $500K | Pre-Seed | Dec 06, 2023 |  |
| Flowty | Flowty is a peer-to-peer (P2P) collateralized NFT lending marketplace that enables borrowers to access liquidity using Flow-based NFTs as collateral and lenders to generate interest income by funding loans secured by NFTs. | $4.5M | Seed | Apr 22, 2022 |  |
| Tonic | A community space for musicians of all levels to practice and perform everyday. Backed by angels including cofounders of YouTube, Twitch, and Twitter Spaces. |  | Seed | Nov 08, 2021 |  |
| Tonic | A community space for musicians of all levels to practice and perform everyday. Backed by angels including cofounders of YouTube, Twitch, and Twitter Spaces. |  | Pre-Seed | Nov 08, 2021 |  |
| Trala | Trala is a developer of a music education application used to teach users to play the violin. Its application offers tutorials, daily lessons, and real-time feedback on mistakes, and its advanced signal processing technology recognizes chords in a busy intersection, providing users with a convenient, affordable, and effective way to learn theviolin. The app gives instant feedback on mistakes through signal processing and has thousands of video tutorials from famous violinists.It was founded in 2017 and has its headquarters in Chicago, Illinois. | $1.3M | Seed | Dec 12, 2018 |  |

6 of 6 investments shown.

## Co-investors
- [Patron](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/patron-9285) — VC Fund, 3 deals together
- [Alumni Ventures](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/alumni-ventures-group) — VC Fund, 2 deals together
- [A16Z GAMES Speedrun](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/a16z-games) — VC Fund, 1 deal together
- [Antler](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/antler-be9c) — VC Fund, 1 deal together
- [Dapper Labs](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/dapper-labs) — VC Fund, 1 deal together
- [DCG Expeditions](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/dcg-expeditions) — VC Fund, 1 deal together

## About Duolingo

VC Fund · Pittsburgh, United States

Duolingo is a language-learning education platform that offers 98 total courses across nearly 40 distinct languages. The platform enables anyone to learn languages for free, though they can also pay $7 each month for a premium service that removes ads, delivers offline access, and more. It also claims 30 million users are actively learninglanguages on its platform, and it has emerged as one of the most downloaded educational apps globally.Duolingo provides "Duolingo for Schools" with features designed to allow teachers to track their students. It uses many services in the Amazon Web Services suite of products, including Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, nearly 200 virtual instances in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). The company uses the freemium model; the app and the website are accessible without charge, although Duolingo also offers a premium service for a fee.

5 contacts available at Duolingo.

| Name | Title | Profile |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Albert Cheng | Director of Product Management | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/albert-cheng-4 |
| Bob Meese | Chief Business Officer | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/bob-meese |
| Gillian Munson | Chief Financial Officer | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/gillian-munson |
| Severin Hacker | CTO & Co-founder | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/severin-hacker |
| Antonio Navas | Staff Software Engineer | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/antonio-navas |

## Similar investors

### Similar industry
- [Warner Music Group](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/warner-music-group) — VC Fund
- [Antler](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/antler-be9c) — VC Fund
- [Goodwater Capital](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/goodwater-capital) — VC Fund

### Similar stage
- [Antler](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/antler-be9c) — VC Fund
- [Alumni Ventures](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/alumni-ventures-group) — VC Fund
- [Right Side Capital Management](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/right-side-capital-management) — VC Fund

### Similar country
- [Alumni Ventures](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/alumni-ventures-group) — VC Fund
- [Right Side Capital Management](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/right-side-capital-management) — VC Fund
- [General Catalyst](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/general-catalyst-partners) — VC Fund

## Featured in investor lists
- [Music Angel Investors in United States](https://shizune.co/investors/music-angel-investors-united-states)
- [Music Angel Investors](https://shizune.co/investors/music-angel-investors)
- [Social Angel Investors in United States](https://shizune.co/investors/social-angel-investors-united-states)
- [Social Angel Investors](https://shizune.co/investors/social-angel-investors)

## FAQ

### What does Bob Meese invest in?

Bob Meese invests primarily in Music, E-Learning and Gaming startups, most often at Seed and Pre-Seed stage. Most of the 6 investments tracked by Shizune back companies in United States. The Investment Focus section breaks down every industry, stage and country in the portfolio.

### What is Bob Meese's check size?

Bob Meese typically joins rounds of $1.3M–$9M at Seed. These ranges are 10th–90th percentile round sizes calculated from confirmed public funding rounds, so they are a realistic guide to the rounds Bob Meese participates in.

### When did Bob Meese last invest?

The most recent investment recorded for Bob Meese closed in May 2024. Shizune tracks 6 investments in total for this profile, including round sizes, stages and portfolio companies, all sourced from confirmed public funding rounds and refreshed monthly.

### Is Shizune's investor data accurate?

Yes — every stat on this profile is calculated from confirmed public funding rounds monitored across hundreds of sources since 2020. This profile was last refreshed in Aug 2026 and is updated monthly. Spotted something off? Use the “Suggest an edit” link near the top of the page.

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