Outside a purely conceptual point of view, corporate training programs usually have little in common with traditional classroom education. Norway’s Kahoot AS is narrowing the gap.

The startup, which recently raised $20 million from a consortium featuring Microsoft Ventures, offers a platform that lets teachers present quizzes and homework assignments in the form of mobile games. Over 40 percent of K-12 students in the U.S. interact with the service every month, the company claims. Today, Kahoot launched a premium version geared towards enterprises.

The offering targets an already established audience: Kahoot claims that about a million workers use Kahoot for corporate training, including employees at a quarter of the Fortune 500. The educational power of multichoice questions and cheery graphics clearly doesn’t stop at the K-12 level.

Until now, enterprises had to make do with the same capabilities that Kahoot’s education sector users employ in classrooms. The new Kahoot Plus edition augments the core feature set with the ability to create a private portal through which a company can make make tests available for employees.

A set of readymade templates enable corporate customers to quickly get started with the platform. Once a company starts testing employees, built-in reporting features let managers track how each worker performs. A planned update currently in the work will also let them see how test scores change over time.

Kahoot’s push to target enterprises explains the recent investment from Microsoft Ventures, which focuses almost exclusively on backing business technology startups. The Norwegian firm is hardly the first online learning provider to have expanded its efforts beyond the classroom to the the corporate world. Coursera Inc., the online education giant, introduced an enterprise version of its platform last August.

Even Microsoft Corp. itself dabbles in corporate training. The company offers a service called Stream that enables organizations to manage and share internal media content, including learning videos.

Kahoot’s platform is narrower in focus, but clearly has wide appeal. Kahoot Plus starts at $10 per user per month.

Image: Kahoot