# Severin Hacker

> Severin Hacker is a seed investor at Duolingo (Pittsburgh) backing Software and Mobile Apps. See 8 investments, check sizes, portfolio. Updated Aug 2026.

- Type: Angel Investor
- Fund: [Duolingo](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/duolingo)
- Location: Pittsburgh, United States
- Total investments: 8
- Last investment: Sep 2025
- Lead investor: 0%
- Last updated: Aug 2026
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/severinhacker
- X (Twitter): http://twitter.com/severinhacker
- Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/severin.hacker

Severin Hacker is a seed investor at Duolingo in Pittsburgh focused on Software and Mobile Apps. Severin Hacker is the CTO and Co-founder at Duolingo.

## Round sizes

| Stage | Round size |
| --- | --- |
| Seed | $1.3M–$3.3M |
| Pre-Seed | $500k–$1M |
| Series A | $12M–$15M |

## Investment focus

### Industry

| Industry | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Software | 2 | 25% |
| Mobile Apps | 2 | 25% |
| Artificial Intelligence | 2 | 25% |
| Apps | 1 | 13% |
| Music | 1 | 13% |

26 industries tracked in total.

### Stage

| Stage | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Seed | 3 | 38% |
| Series A | 3 | 38% |
| Pre-Seed | 2 | 25% |

### Country

| Country | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| United States | 6 | 75% |
| Finland | 1 | 13% |

## Investments

| Company | Description | Amount | Stage | Date | Website |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Time Atlas Labs | Time Atlas Labs is a Finnish-US technology startup that builds Time Atlas, a privacy-first mobile app. | $2.1M | Seed | Sep 17, 2025 |  |
| Ekho Dealer | Ekho Dealer is a licensed dealership that vehicle manufacturers can integrate into their websites, enabling them to compliantly sell new vehicles online. Ekho Dealer was founded in 2022. | $15M | Series A | Jul 08, 2025 |  |
| Range | Range is a personal finance platform providing online access to financial planners and tools to tracks, plan, and share your finances. | $12M | Series A | May 03, 2023 |  |
| Riot | Riot develops of a security platform designed for fighting phishing attempts. Riot's security platform runs fake phishing campaigns on employees and secures products and internal tools by two-factor authentications, enabling companies to educating their employees about security breaches. | $12M | Series A | Feb 07, 2023 |  |
| Gridwise | The Gridwise app is the leading business platform for gig economy drivers, helping them maximize their earnings and track their business performance all in one place. Their app empowers 100s of thousands of all US gig drivers to run their businesses with unique demand insights, earnings, and activity tracking, performance reporting, and amarketplace of gig worker benefits. | $3.3M | Seed | Feb 28, 2020 |  |
| Brainbase | Brainbase helps teams optimize their partnerships from contract to revenue. | $1M | Pre-Seed | Feb 19, 2019 |  |
| 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 |  |
| Gridwise | The Gridwise app is the leading business platform for gig economy drivers, helping them maximize their earnings and track their business performance all in one place. Their app empowers 100s of thousands of all US gig drivers to run their businesses with unique demand insights, earnings, and activity tracking, performance reporting, and amarketplace of gig worker benefits. | $500K | Pre-Seed | Jul 24, 2017 |  |

8 of 8 investments shown.

## Co-investors
- [Y Combinator](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/y-combinator) — VC Fund, 2 deals together
- [412 Venture Fund](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/412-venture-fund) — VC Fund, 1 deal together
- [8-Bit Capital](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/8-bit-capital) — VC Fund, 1 deal together
- [Activant Capital](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/activant-capital) — VC Fund, 1 deal together
- [Base10 Partners](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/base10-partners) — VC Fund, 1 deal together
- [Beni VC](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/beni-vc) — 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 |

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## Featured in investor lists
- [Mobile Apps Angel Investors in Finland](https://shizune.co/investors/mobile-apps-angel-investors-finland)
- [Mobile Angel Investors in Finland](https://shizune.co/investors/mobile-angel-investors-finland)

## FAQ

### What does Severin Hacker invest in?

Severin Hacker invests primarily in Software, Mobile Apps and Artificial Intelligence startups, most often at Seed and Series A stage. Most of the 8 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 Severin Hacker's check size?

Severin Hacker typically joins rounds of $1.3M–$3.3M at Seed, $500k–$1M at Pre-Seed and $12M–$15M at Series A. These ranges are 10th–90th percentile round sizes calculated from confirmed public funding rounds, so they are a realistic guide to the rounds Severin Hacker participates in.

### When did Severin Hacker last invest?

The most recent investment recorded for Severin Hacker closed in Sep 2025. Shizune tracks 8 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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