As part of our Member Focus series, NBAS spotlights Kahoot!, a Norwegian-born learning platform built on a simple Nordic idea: how do you make learning fun and easy to understand? In this Q&A, Ahteram Uddin, Growth Director for Asia & MENA, shares how Kahoot! is scaling across Asia-Pacific from Singapore and how its journey reflects the role Singapore can play in supporting Norwegian companies’ growth across the region.
Kahoot! was founded in Norway in 2012 and launched to the general public in 2013, growing from a Nordic idea about making learning more engaging into a global platform used across classrooms, workplaces and beyond.
From its Singapore hub, Kahoot! supports growth across markets including Hong Kong, India, Taiwan, Malaysia and Thailand. The regional team works with schools, ministries of education and enterprises to deliver localised learning experiences across one of the world’s fastest-growing regions for digital learning.
In the conversation below, Ahteram Uddin reflects on Kahoot!’s Asia-Pacific milestones, the impact of game-based learning in both education and workplace training, and what the company’s growth shows about Singapore’s role as a regional hub.
Q&A with Ahteram Uddin
Q: Why did Kahoot! choose Singapore as its Asia-Pacific hub, and what role does the Singapore office play in the region?
A: We chose Singapore as our APAC hub because it’s one of the most forward-looking markets in the world when it comes to lifelong learning and digital transformation. The national investment in upskilling, with SkillsFuture as the clearest example, reflects a government and workforce that take continuous learning seriously, and that’s exactly the audience Kahoot! is built for. There’s also a growing appetite here for learning solutions that are flexible and, importantly, measurable, not just “we ran a training session” but “here’s what people actually retained.”
Functionally, this office is our regional nerve centre. It’s where we coordinate growth across markets like Hong Kong, India, Taiwan, Malaysia and Thailand, drive localisation into local languages, and build out the partnerships with ministries of education, schools and enterprises that let us go deep in each market rather than just being present in it. Singapore gives us both the credibility and the infrastructure to do that at a regional scale.
Q: What have been some of Kahoot!’s biggest Asia-Pacific milestones?
A: The numbers still surprise me a little. In the past year alone we’ve had more than 300 million non-unique participants across APAC and over 1.5 million teachers are actively using Kahoot! in their classrooms. We’ve done almost none of this through advertising. It’s spread teacher to teacher, colleague to colleague.
Thailand is a good example of what that looks like at scale: over 29 million people there have used Kahoot!, built almost entirely on word of mouth once Thai became a supported language. That pattern – localising properly, then letting usage compound organically – is really the story of our regional growth.
Q: What does impact actually look like in schools and at work?
A: In classrooms, the win is time. Teachers tell me they spend less time on preparation, quizzing and marking, and more time actually engaged with students. One teacher at an international school here described it as saving real lesson-preparation time while still reinforcing what students had just learned and keeping the class genuinely enjoying learning alongside their peers.
In the workplace, it’s a different kind of win: engagement you can actually measure. HR and L&D leaders use Kahoot! to run meetings and training sessions people don’t check out of. One HR professional told me it lets him build an interactive session in minutes even when he’s short on time and still hold the room’s attention. This is where the ROI conversation gets easy: if you hand someone a compliance PDF, you have no idea whether they read it. If they go through it in Kahoot!, you know exactly what percentage of people completed it, who understood what and who needs a nudge. That shift from “we distributed information” to “we can prove people learned it” is what makes the business case for L&D teams internally.
Q: With Kahoot!’s roots in Norway and its growing success in Singapore, how does the company engage with the Norwegian business community here?
A: Kahoot! started with a simple, very Nordic idea: how do you make learning fun and easy to understand? That founding instinct, flat, playful and trusting the learner, has travelled remarkably well into Asia, even across very different education systems and corporate cultures. I think that’s actually a nice data point for Norwegian companies looking at this region: you don’t need to dilute what makes your product distinctive to succeed here. You need to invest in local language, local content and local relationships, and the product philosophy can stay exactly what it was in Oslo.
That’s part of why I stay actively involved with NBAS. I recently spoke at the Tech Circle event on the future of the workplace, talking through how new, more engaging approaches to learning are shaping skills development in modern organisations, sitting alongside a session on real-time collaboration tools and a panel on how people, learning and technology need to work together for organisations to stay agile.
NBAS is a great bridge for this: it’s a room full of Norwegian and Nordic-linked businesses in Singapore facing exactly the reskilling and engagement pressures we build for, so it’s a natural place to bring Kahoot!’s story and actually demonstrate gamified learning as a workforce upskilling tool, not just describe it. If anything, I’d say Kahoot!’s traction in APAC is proof that Norway’s technology and education sector has more to offer this region than people might assume and platforms like NBAS are exactly how that gets translated into real business relationships.
LEARN MORE
To learn more about Kahoot! and its learning solutions for schools, organisations and individuals, visit kahoot.com.
GET IN TOUCH
Interested in bringing Kahoot! to your school or organisation? Connect with the Kahoot! team through their contact page.
From its Norwegian roots to its growing presence across Asia-Pacific, Kahoot! continues to demonstrate how engaging, game-based learning can help empower educators, businesses and lifelong learners across the region.