Kahoot! continued to deliver solid financial growth in the first quarter of 2021. The Kahoot! Group reported invoiced revenue of $19.1 million for Q1 2021, representing 195% year-over-year growth, solid margin and free cash flow, as announced in our trading update earlier today.

In Q1, user growth on the platform continued with more than 28 million active accounts (68% year-over-year growth), hosting 279 million games (28% year-over-year increase) with more than 1.6 billion participating players (24% year-over-year growth), all in the last 12 months.

We also saw strong growth in paid subscriptions for Kahoot!, reaching more than 760,000 in the first quarter of 2021, an increase of 85,000 paid subscribers from Q4 2020, whereof 44,000 are Kahoot! licenses. The year-over-year growth in paid subscriptions including acquisitions was 277% (560,000) in Q1 2021 compared to the same time last year.

Kahoot! acquires motimate: a big step for our employee engagement and learning ambitions

Today we also announced that Kahoot! has acquired Motimate, an employee engagement and learning app provider to organizations of all sizes. 

With the rise of new work patterns, including hybrid and remote work scenarios globally, there is a strong need among organizations of all sizes to keep employees engaged in a fun, easy way, and to build a strong team spirit and culture, no matter where employees are located.

We believe that the addition of Motimate will allow Kahoot! to accelerate the building of the next generation of tools for employee learning, engagement and corporate culture. This acquisition is yet another step in Kahoot!’s strategy to build the world’s leading learning platform and strengthen Kahoot! at work’s offerings even further.

The synergies between Kahoot! 360 Spirit, our employee engagement platform Actimo, and now Motimate, will give Kahoot! a stronger position in the market, and help us move faster by adding to key competency areas such as sales and product development, with Actimo and Motimate counting more than 250,000 active employees globally on their platforms, combined.

To learn more about Motimate and our acquisition, please read the press release.

Major milestones and accomplishments in Q1 

We kicked off the first quarter of 2021 by reaching a big milestone of 5 billion cumulative participating players since Kahoot! was launched in 2013.

In February, we announced the acquisition of Whiteboard.fi, an online whiteboard tool for teachers and classrooms that helps engage students both in the physical classroom and through remote learning. Through this acquisition, Kahoot! expanded its platform to provide more powerful learning and engagement tools for more than 8 million teachers and educators on the Kahoot! platform. 

We made several powerful product and feature updates for both teachers and students as well as for corporate users. Based on popular requests, we launched the ability for students to see both questions and answers on their devices in a live Kahoot! or virtually, providing a more accessible and inclusive experience for all. In addition, we upgraded our free-for-teachers offering to allow all K-12 teachers to add slides in their kahoots.

In March, we introduced Kahoot! Academy Connect, a community for educators allowing them to network, discover and share unique learning content with millions of educators, teachers and followers on the Kahoot! platform. In the coming months, we will continue to improve Kahoot! Academy Connect, including more functionality for sharing and connecting for more users and publishing partners. Additionally, we will also introduce Kahoot! Academy Marketplace where educators will be able to offer their content for purchase to other users. 

For our corporate users, we introduced several improvements including new slide layouts as part of Kahoot! 360 for work to give participants more context while boosting focus. We also announced our upcoming PowerPoint add-in allowing hosts to present kahoots without ever leaving PowerPoint’s presenter view, giving hosts more opportunities to make their presentations more engaging and interactive, whether in-person or online. 

Earlier in March, we hosted our Kahoot! EDU Meetup: Spring edition where 5,000 educators from all around the world joined us for the virtual professional development event to hear about educators’ best practices, new features and exciting offerings for hybrid learning. 

We launched our collaboration with Google Search, to bring Kahoot!’s engaging learning experiences to Google Search users worldwide. This collaboration allows anyone to discover and play math practice problems from Kahoot! Academy directly from the Google Search results page. 

As part of our strategy to make Kahoot! even more accessible, relevant and intuitive for our global community, particularly for young learners, we launched two new languages, German and Italian, to the growing numbers of languages that the Kahoot! app now supports, including Spanish, French and Portuguese. The upcoming addition of language learning to the Kahoot! app will enable reading out questions and answers for self-study, supporting over 30 languages. 

A new report from Interbrand estimated the strength of the Kahoot! brand, currently describing Kahoot! as “a platform and experience that users feel passionate about” and “there is a deeper sense of connection that users feel with Kahoot!” The report also shows that Kahoot!’s Global Brand Strength (one of three main criteria for brand value) is on par with the likes of long-established global brands such as YouTube, Nintendo and Sony.

Last but not least in an eventful first quarter of the year, Kahoot! reached another milestone as we started to trade on the Oslo Stock Exchange main list – being available to an even larger, global investor base with a passion for making learning awesome!

As we head into the second quarter, we will continue to launch new initiatives catering to all audiences, including our upcoming launch of a Zoom integration that will allow users to host and play Kahoot! games and presentations without ever leaving the Zoom meeting. 

Finally, we look forward to launch Kahoot! 360 Spirit during Q2, our first Employee Engagement offering on the Kahoot! platform, providing a complete solution for corporate learning, audience engagement, company culture and team spirit building, together with the upcoming Kahoot! Engage feature, blending the video conference into the Kahoot! at work experience.

Stay tuned for more exciting news in the coming months, making Kahoot! engage, inspire and connect professionals, educators and learners on digital platforms and when returning to schools and workplaces, to make learning awesome!