2020 proved to be a pivotal year for Kahoot!. As the focus turned towards fighting a global pandemic, the world embraced new ways of learning, working and socializing, almost overnight. We witnessed the rapid acceleration of digitalization across all aspects of life, and at Kahoot!, we were prepared for the changes.

As a company, we were well-positioned to support educators, students, parents, professionals and social groups as they navigated a new and virtual means of engaging, entertaining and learning. It became more important than ever in 2020 for us to fulfill our mission of making learning awesome for everyone, whether physically together or virtually at a safe social distance.

Kahoot! experienced massive adoption globally throughout 2020, as it became an essential toolkit to stimulate engagement at school, work and home, during the pandemic and beyond. We achieved a major milestone for Kahoot!, reaching 5 billion participating players since launch, a number that’s been steadily growing over our seven-year history. This was a proud moment for all of us in Kahoot!, and a truly awesome way to end the year.

Our solid organic growth fueled our ambitions to build the world’s leading learning platform, and we further strengthened this position by acquiring employee engagement platform Actimo and language learning platform Drops. With these two powerful companies now in the Kahoot! family, we have been able to bolster our learning offerings for corporate learners and those learning at home, in addition to introducing new functionality that enables millions of users to learn more effectively.

Over the course of the year, the Kahoot! team continued to develop and execute on our strategy and ambitious roadmap targeting our primary segments: at school, at home and at work. We continued to build our globally recognized brand with a viral distribution model—based on a scalable technology platform.

Solid financial performance

As we closed out the year, I am proud to share that our organization has stepped up to the challenges and also delivered solid financial growth. The Kahoot! Group reported invoiced revenue of more than $45 million for the full year 2020, representing 247% year-over-year growth. We finished the year with annual recurring revenue (ARR) of approximately $60 million compared to $14 million at the same time last year.

The user growth on the platform continued with more than 24 million active accounts in 2020 (57% year-over-year growth), more than 250 million hosted games (19% year-over-year increase) and approximately 1.5 billion participating players (26% year-over-year growth), all in the last 12 months.

We also saw strong growth in paid subscriptions for Kahoot!, reaching more than 550,000 in the fourth quarter of 2020, at a growth rate of 220% compared to the same time last year. At the same time, we maintained a strong focus on running our operations with positive cash flow. Q4 was the fifth consecutive quarter with positive cash flow, as reported $7 million in the quarter.

Kahoot! raised more than $240 million in funding in 2020 to accelerate growth through value-creating organic and non-organic opportunities, putting the company in a strong position to continue focused execution in the future.

Building a solid foundation through a strong team and culture

As a company, we shifted to a fully remote operational working model, becoming almost completely virtual, along with much of the world as a result of the pandemic. Despite the challenging times, the Kahoot! team has done a great job making sure we were able to continue to deliver improved products and services throughout the year for all users and customers.

We are fortunate that, over the years, the Kahoot! team has built a solid technical foundation, resulting in a scalable cloud platform with a viral business model, enabling us to continuously add more value for all our users. It’s a model that served us well during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Over the course of the year, our team has grown to 200+ employees, all of whom represent the strong Kahoot! culture of curiosity, inclusivity and playfulness. We aim to expand our employee base in all areas of the company in 2021. Our first priority has been to invest into engineering and product development, in addition to acquiring talents in customer experience, design, assisted sales, and corporate development and operations throughout the year.

More exciting opportunities in 2021

As we look back on our incredible journey in 2020, I have a tremendous amount of optimism for our future and our ability to continue to support our users and customers during these challenging times. I am incredibly proud of how we as a company have come together to strengthen our trajectory of our operations. We’ve done this through product development, constant focus on the user experience, and our ability to pivot and reimagine, in order to meet the changing needs of all our user groups and customers.

Looking ahead, we are heading toward an important milestone of our main listing on the Oslo Stock Exchange before the end of the first quarter of 2021. In addition, we will explore the opportunity for a secondary listing during 2021. We plan to offer new, free and premium tools and functionality for interactive presentations for school and work, corporate training, language learning, Academy Marketplace and additional content offerings from publishing partners.

There’s still a lot of important work to be done that will require us to stay the course, but I’m excited about the opportunities that lie ahead as we continue on our mission to make learning awesome for all!