An education app founded by a group of university students nine years ago has surprised its 53 employees with a NZ$10,000 bonus, after being named the fastest growing company in New Zealand.
Kami, meaning paper in Japanese, is a digital classroom platform and app, which allows teachers and students to interact with, and collaborate on, documents and learning resources, either within the classroom or remotely.
The company is not the only one in the news recently for rewarding its employees – US shapewear company Spanx last week announced it was giving employees two first-class plane tickets and US$10,000 each to mark its new US$1.2bn valuation.
Kami was founded in 2013 by Auckland university students Hengjie Wang, Jordan Thoms, and Alliv Samson, who were looking for a way to digitally streamline their note-taking. The service is now used in more than 180 countries and by more than 30 million teachers and students, with its largest user-base in North America. Now, more than 90% of US schools are using the platform.
Last week, the company secured the number one spot in the 2021 Deloitte Fast 50 index, with “a remarkable 1,177% revenue growth over the past three years”, according to Deloitte.
Last year, Kami offered its software to teachers around the globe free of charge to help them continue to digitally reach students during the worst of the global pandemic.
Sales dried up overnight, the company’s chief executive Wang said, but that turned around when teachers asked to start paying, to ensure the platform’s future.
“Fast forward 18 months, with that sort of massive shift in education, we saw maybe about five years’ worth of growth in the market in one year.”
To celebrate both this success and hitting the 30 million user mark, the company decided to reward its employees.
“Our team had been working incredibly long hours, made a lot of sacrifices over the last 18 months, supporting teachers and students globally. We wanted a way to say thank you and recognise what they have achieved,” Wang said.
Kami announced the bonus in a Zoom call to staff this week, saying they were all “shocked and surprised”.
“We live in one of the most diverse cities that you can ever possibly operate in so, you know, I think we ultimately just built a company that reflects the Auckland culture … we really want to celebrate the best ideas and letting them come to the top, and over time that that has clearly shown in our results.”
Wang said he hopes Kami’s success could become an example to other local tech startups.
“You hear all of these big startup funding announcements, and Kami was certainly not one of these. But despite this we have shown the world that achieving this level of growth and the impact that we have is possible. Operating a cashflow-positive startup is possible.
“We have shown that it is possible from little old New Zealand. Capital is not a barrier to growth and success.”