It is hard to believe that we are more than halfway through 2021. Globally, certain parts of society are cautiously beginning to reopen. Some schools and educational institutions are returning to in-person learning, while workplaces, too, in some cases are exploring a return to work in an in-person or hybrid capacity.

As we outlined in today’s presentation, global megatrends and technology are reshaping education and learning. That makes this a really exciting time for working in EdTech.

The back-to-school season is already here and some schools are planning to return to in-person learning after a year and a half of a virtual learning experience. At Kahoot! we are aware of the upcoming challenges this represents, but we are ready to face them together with parents and educators around the world. We are also aware of the rising need to focus on the development of social emotional learning (SEL) skills and strengthening the mental health of young learners. Kahoot! is also ready to offer engaging experiences and tools that can help educators and students tackle the challenges of learning loss across the curriculum from the previous school year.

For professionals and organizations, too, the last year and a half have resulted in some challenges and opportunities around company culture. Now more than ever employers and employees are looking for ways to build and maintain healthy company culture, as well as seeking solutions to help them respond to growing reskilling and upskilling needs. In addition, the hybrid model of working is now a reality for many, representing an exciting opportunity for the use of technologies that help colleagues feel connected whether they’re working in the office, or remotely.

As the scenarios for our users change, Kahoot! has been in a fortunate position as a multi-faceted digital learning platform enabling users to overcome their challenges and embrace opportunities by leveraging engagement at school, work and home, whether virtually or physically present, learning in real time or asynchronously.

Strong growth continues in Q2 2021

Today we are pleased to share that Kahoot! continues to deliver strong financial performance in the second quarter of 2021, and that we are progressing well in delivering on our business agenda and annual targets.

The second quarter has been the company’s most active thus far across all aspects of the business, including R&D and product releases, technical partner integrations, localization efforts as well as new partnerships and acquisitions. This quarter, we took significant steps in reaching our goal to become a global leading learning platform company.

Our record-high activity on the Kahoot! platform in the second quarter – including more than 29 million active accounts, hosting 303 milion games, for more than 1.8 billion participating players in the last 12 months – is a testament to the strength of the Kahoot! brand and our vision to make learning awesome, as reported in our Q2 financial results today.

We also continued the growth in paid subscriptions, reaching 933K in the second quarter. This includes all subscriptions on Kahoot!, DragonBox math curriculum, Drops language learning, Whiteboard.fi and employee licenses from Actimo and Motimate.

Last year, Kahoot! delivered very strong growth in the unprecedented second quarter and we achieved continued growth both organically and in total for the group year-over-year. In Q2 this year invoiced revenue was $20.6 million, a 114% year-over-year growth.

Major milestones and accomplishments in Q2-2021

A key goal for Kahoot! in the second half of 2020 and first half of 2021 has been to increase momentum in building our employee engagement offering, with the overall goals of rapid solution launches to capture increased demand for online corporate learning. In the beginning of the second quarter we announced the acquisition of the learning app provider Motimate, which further accelerates the building of the next generation of tools for employee learning, engagement and corporate culture. With this acquisition, Kahoot! continues to strengthen its position in the employee engagement market, having acquired Actimo in October 2020 and launched the Kahoot! 360 Spirit initiative in Q1 2021. The combined user base of Motimate and Actimo represents more than a quarter of a million employees, providing additional scale and reach. In Q2 we initiated the first large-scale corporate projects based on Kahoot! Spirit.

An important event for us in the second quarter was the announcement of the acquisition of Clever, Inc, a widely used digital learning platform in U.S. K-12 (kindergarten to 12th grade) schools to engage both in the physical classroom and through remote learning. We expect the acquisition to close in the third quarter of 2021 and we are excited about the value the partnership will bring to all stakeholders.

We continue to expand geographically, both through engaging new partnerships and launching localized services. In Q3 2020, we launched our Spanish language version and are pleased to see that Latin America is now among the fastest growing markets with more than 130% growth in active accounts over the last 12 months. We have continued our localization efforts and we recently launched several new language versions in the Kahoot! app, including our first Asian language – Japanese. During the second half of the year, Arabic and simplified Chinese will be added. In addition, we launched our award-winning learn-to-read app Poio in German and Italian. We suggest you stay tuned as we will soon add French (including a Canadian French edition) and Brazilian Portuguese to Kahoot! Poio Read.

We made several powerful product and feature updates for both teachers and students as well as corporate users. To make our product experience as inclusive and accessible as possible for learners of all ages, backgrounds and abilities, we added a new read aloud game option in the Kahoot! app. This feature reads aloud the question and answer alternatives, so players can choose the answer if they cannot read the text on screen, available in 37 languages.

We added a powerful integration with Microsoft PowerPoint, which has been one of the top requested features from our users at school and work. This integration enables them to host kahoots from within a PowerPoint presentation to engage and energize audiences of any size, both in-person and virtually. Similarly, Kahoot!’s integration with virtual experiences platform Hopin helps take audience engagement at virtual events to a new level.

In July, we launched our much-anticipated integration with Zoom that allows users to host and play Kahoot! games and presentations without ever leaving their Zoom meetings. In the same month, we also launched our integration with Giphy to bring even more fun, engagement and self-expression to learning.

For our users at home, we launched Kahoot! on the Amazon Appstore to bring the magic of Kahoot! to millions of Amazon Fire tablet customers.

The Kahoot! Academy team continued to provide more high-quality content for our users, whether at school, home or even work! We launched a series of kahoots all about anger management, in collaboration with Angry Birds, which helps users to explore how they experience anger in the workplace and what strategies they can use to handle difficult situations. The team also launched new learning games from Pixar’s brand new movie “Luca” to help learners of all ages build social and emotional (SEL) skills.

In June, we hosted the Kahoot! EDU Summit with more than 30,000 educators around the world tuning in to attend 20+ sessions and 30+ speakers on professional development. Earlier in the quarter, we also hosted the Kahoot! WorkMeetups and where thousands of professionals attended to learn about how to bring engagement to the workplace.

A key focus in the last twelve months has been to further build out the Kahoot! team with additional resources to strengthen the commercial strategy and execution.

All in all the second quarter of 2021 has been strategically important for the Kahoot! Group as we have made significant progress across all teams and units. At the same time, we still have a huge potential for further growth and scale with our ecosystem of services, users, customers and partners. We are in an early phase of firming up important initiatives to tap into our vast commercial potential.

Looking into the future

As the global vaccine response to the pandemic has been rolled out and many schools, educational institutions as well as workplaces are gradually returning to a hybrid or more in-presence environment, Kahoot! continues to attract new users and subscribers across all markets and customer segments. The growth on the Kahoot! platform continues through the first half of the year with a record-high number of new signups in the second quarter, setting us up well for further return on investment as we move forward.

I believe we offer a strong product portfolio, scaled customer base and team as we move into the end of the year.

For the back-to-school season, we will offer several exciting features for educators, including a new team mode where every student is motivated to participate as well as a brand new experience tailored to kids—specially for the youngest learners!

Some of the updates for Kahoot! EDU, which offers site licenses for schools and districts, will include integrations with Clever and Google Classroom and more. In the fall, we will also be launching Kahoot! Math Labs, our toolbox offering for schools and districts for math instruction.

For our users in the workplace, we will continue to add more content designed for professionals with Kahoot! Academy at work and more!

We have a lot of exciting launches and initiatives to share in the coming months, so stay tuned as we take the next steps in our mission to make learning awesome, everywhere!