Hello, and welcome to today's webcast with Checkin.com Group. Today we have the CEO, Kristoffer Cassel, and CFO, Martin Bäuml, with us. If you have any questions for Kristoffer and Martin, you can ask them in the forum on this webpage where you find this webcast stream. With that said, I hand over the word to Kristoffer and Martin.
Thank you so much. My name is Kristoffer Cassel. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Checkin, and Martin, who is our CFO, is also on the call. I think we'll try to continue the same format as we have had previous quarters. This is our third quarterly report as a listed company. We assume that most people who listen in have read the report and know the company to some extent, at least. We'll try to highlight some of the takeaways from the report and try to go straight to the point and then leave room for questions at the end.
For me, what really summarizes this quarter, I think, is that it feels like we have really geared up to a new level, both in terms of demand from the market for our software, but also internal capacity to handle that demand and take advantage of it. We deliver yet again a strong and increasing growth for the quarter. The quarterly growth for Q4 compared to last year is 84% up. This is really driven by a strong demand. We see several macro trends that gives us you know a tailwind really and drives the business forward. Both digitalization, but also perhaps more importantly, regulation in several of our key markets. We have a strong demand.
We have also built up a capacity throughout the last couple of quarters to really handle that demand. We have invested heavily in a new sales organization, invested in the technology. In a sense, we have bigger sales to capture that wind with. Now that the growth in the quarter is in line with our long-term target, which is to reach half a billion Swedish krona for the full year of 2025. I mentioned that in my CEO comment that if you zoom in on the growth rate between quarter three and quarter four, the momentum is actually even higher.
If you extrapolate that growth, it correlates to a 3x revenue growth on a yearly basis. We are in a strong momentum as well. Another way to visualize that is quarter by quarter the total revenue we have had. We know that historically we have had strong Q4s, strong end of the years, and we see that also here. We feel that this is sort of a new level, and we're expecting increased growth also in the coming quarters. This quarter, I think the whole Q4 gives us confidence in the growth investments we have done. We have invested strongly in the parts of the company that drive growth. It's really our high gross margin that facilitates this.
It gives us room to invest in the new sales organization, which has started to contribute. I think here we still think that we will gain more speed in the coming quarters when it comes to the sales organization. We also increased our marketing spend dramatically, and we have continued to invest in technology. I write about that in the CEO comment. We have the feeling that we are really getting a positive spiral effect here. The hope is, and I talk about that sometimes, to see the business as a flywheel, where it takes some effort to get it spinning, but once it's spinning, it keeps spinning, largely thanks to our high Net Revenue Retention rates.
That gives us comfort in investing in growth because we know that the investments we did in growth during Q3 grew the revenues during Q4, which in turn allows us to invest again in more growth. A lot of these investments, I think we will see the results of in the coming quarters. We're trying to speed this up, and we're feeling that Q4 gives us confidence in the strategy. Speaking about strategy, we're sort of continuing along the path that we have chosen for the business. We're focusing on new customers to continue invest in customer acquisition, global scalability. At the end of the year, we had 160 paying customers in total. We also grow with our existing customers.
We are able to continue to deliver positive net revenue retention by having our existing partners stay with us and also expand their usage of our software. This is a new metric we're adding to the Q4 report, which is our NRR, which is 137%. It shows the strong growth that we have from the clients, from the existing client cohorts. We're growing with the customers we're having as well. Lastly, we're also continuing to look for teams and technology to acquire. We have done two acquisitions last year, both GetID and DATACORP, and I'll talk a bit more about DATACORP . These acquisitions are quite small. The dilution is altogether less than 5%.
For us, we believe this is important technological acquisitions that will strengthen us in the long term. Going a bit deeper into DATACORP , we acquired it during Q4, we announced it and we acquired it in January. It's an Estonian AI company that develops facial recognition software and computer vision software that we believe is really, you know, world-leading in its niche. That technology will strengthen our tech leadership and really enhance our software, I think both in the medium and in the long term. It is our technology that makes us grow fast. It's because our software works, because our software creates big large values for our customers, that we have a high demand, that we have a high Net Revenue Retention.
That really puts us in a strong position for the years to come. That's true both for the R&D that we're investing heavily in, as well as DATACORP in this case, or GetID, which is another technology we acquired last year. Our focus here when it comes to acquisition is to keep integrating the two acquisitions we have done on a technological level, on operational level, and also to keep on commercializing the software in the best possible way. I think this gives us altogether when it comes to Q4. It gives us comfort also in our long-term financial goal, which is to grow the net revenue on average 86% annually, and to reach half a billion SEK at 2025.
We're in line with this growth in Q4, and we feel confident with this goal. To sum up Q4, it's strong growth. It's an increasing growth. It's also a quarter where we have high and increasing gross margins that have allowed us to invest in the business, and we see very positively on 2022 and the year to come. It will be interesting to see the development for this year. With that, I leave over to Martin, who will dig into the financial figures a bit more.
Thank you, Kristoffer. To those of you who have read the actual report, you've probably now noticed that it's a little bit longer and kind of has a bit more details and notes than our previous reports. This is due to the fact that we've had many, especially international investors, asking us about our accounting standards. It's therefore worth noting that this is the first report that we are releasing in accordance fully with IFRS, i.e. the International Financial Reporting Standards. This transition job has been a fair amount of work internally, but the numbers themselves aren't really impacted. For those interested, there are a lot of notes and details about that in the actual report. I was thinking this presentation to go through just the numbers themselves and how we see the quarter developments.
To summarize, net revenue increased 84% to SEK 13.4 million in the quarter. Gross margin also went up to 84%. We continue to invest in sales and marketing, remaining at three times the level that we invested last year and last quarter. EBITDA just below breakeven with a margin of -6%, same as Q4 last year. Cash flow from operating activities slightly improved from last year, SEK - 1 million. We ended the year with SEK 92 million in cash, and netting out our interest-bearing debts with a net cash of SEK 69 million and an equity ratio 80%. If we start by looking at the net revenue, those who followed us in last quarterly presentations recognize this chart.
Now we've added the largest building block to date with the total revenue of SEK 13.4 million in the quarter, which completes the stacked 2021 column with revenues of SEK 38.9 million in the year of 2021. The growth in the quarter of 84% is in line with the growth rate from last year, and it's also in line with our long-term financial targets that Kristoffer Cassel just discussed. But it's also an acceleration compared to the growth in the previous quarters of 2021, where we grew between 65% and 72%. Maybe the most interesting part of this slide, I think, is the way we have grown.
If you look at the quarterly revenues of SEK 13.4 million, it's actually quite a lot bigger than the full year revenue of 2019, which further illustrates the growth journey that we're on. Moving to gross profit, it amounted to SEK 11.3 million in the quarter, corresponding to a margin of 84%, which is the same we also had for the full year of 2021, and which is also slightly higher than the 81% we had in 2019 and 2020. As Kristoffer touched upon earlier, it's our strong margins and therefore our high gross profit, the SEK 32.5 million in the full year of 2021 that enable us to reinvest further into growth-generating activities, foremost product development and sales and marketing.
Looking at sales and marketing specifically, you can see here that we continue the investments that we kind of touched upon in the last quarterly report where we stepped up the investments to about 40%. In this quarter, the exact number landed on 39%. Continuous investment in sales and marketing. In absolute numbers, we have more than tripled our investments in sales and marketing during the year of 2021. In absolute numbers, it's SEK 9 million more than during 2020, as can be seen on the left-hand side of the charts here.
Even though we've had those strong investments, we still see a lot of the upside hopefully lies ahead of us in terms of the investment we're doing in sales and marketing, we still managed to keep EBITDA close to breakeven and in line with the margin of 6% we had in this quarter last year. Even though we had those SEK 9 million of extra investment in sales and marketing, EBITDA ended up just SEK 4 million below last year, which further emphasized the strength of our business model and where we have efficient and scalable growth with high gross margins and a great organization that delivers a lot of value to our customers.
Going to the last page, if we look at our financial position, I think the charts pretty much speaks for themselves. We ended the year with a cash position of about SEK 92 million, and if we net out the interest-bearing debt, we had net cash of SEK 69 million, which I think is the highest number we have ever had on a kind of quarterly reporting basis. This is obviously also reflected in our equity ratio, which also went up to 80% at the end of the year. With that, I turn back to Kristoffer for a summary and some concluding remarks.
Thank you, Martin. To summarize the financial position at the end of Q4, we have strong and increasing growth. We have high margins that is also increasing, that has allowed us to invest significantly in long-term growth. We have a cash position that enables further acquisitions as well. All in all, we have a really good position going into this year, and as I said before, we're looking forward for 2022 and the quarters ahead. With that, I will hand back the word to Kristoffer for some questions.
Great. Thank you, Kristoffer and Martin, for the presentation. Let's kick off the Q&A session then. How has the development been regarding the Dutch gaming market?
Yeah, we haven't publicized any details on a sort of market-by-market split in the quarterly report. We see very strong demand in the Dutch market, which is a re-regulated iGaming market. We also see the same in Germany, and we have big hopes for the upcoming regulation in Canada or Ontario that is upcoming. I think this is one of the examples where regulation really is positive for us and drives the business. We keep having a very strong momentum in Holland, as well as some other re-regulated iGaming markets.
Okay. Thank you. Next question is regarding Ryanair. Ryanair was during Q3 one of your fastest-growing customers. How has the development been during Q4 with regards to the presence of Omicron, for example, here in Europe?
I think we normally don't comment on specific customers' development, and I think that they probably want to comment themselves on how Omicron has affected their developments and so on. I'll leave that to Ryanair. On a more general note, we have a positive Net Revenue Retention, as I mentioned, and we believe a lot in the cooperation with Ryanair, but also in the travel market in general. We hope that it will be a positive cooperation also in the coming year.
Okay. Thank you. What is the growth rate between existing and new customers?
Yeah, I think here is where we publicized the net revenue retention numbers. If you look into the report more in detail, I think you can actually back solve that a bit with that number. We are growing with our existing customers. Even if we don't acquire any new customers, we will still grow. As I've said before in previous presentations, that long term, we need to expand our customer base, of course. We want to become a global SaaS software company that really changes the internet, and that's about new customer acquisition. We get a lot of growth from the existing customers, but we also focus of course on new acquisition.
Okay. Thank you. If we look at the ARR, what is the number for ARR, as of now?
We have previously published that during Q3 we broke a milestone of SEK 50 million ARR. We will continue to publish when we break some of these larger milestones when it comes to ARR. I think a good estimation of our current ARR is to take the quarter and multiply it by four. That gives a hunch of where we are, but we are not tracking ARR publicly. We are not tracking it as a metric on a quarterly basis in that sense.
Okay. Thank you. Next question is, you performed a strong Q4. How much of that is explained by seasonal effects?
Yeah, I think this is a good question. It's really Q4 has been a strong quarter historically for us, and I think this quarter again is very strong. When I show the chart where I stacked the quarters next to each other, for us it feels like Q4 is at a new level. We also have that expectation based on the sort of momentum we're feeling, where we think that Q1 and the coming quarters will have a higher growth. It's really up for us to prove that with the Q1 numbers once they come. Our expectation is that part of it is strong seasonality, but that we really have geared up to a new level in a sense.
Okay. If you invest heavily into sales and marketing, have you seen any effects of this?
Yes, of course. We think that the increased investments of course is adding to the capabilities of taking care of the demand that we see for our software. I think everyone should also be aware that our sales cycles, especially when it comes to enterprise customers, are quite long, several months or so. That means, I think like Martin said, that a lot of the investments that we're doing during Q4 is really to facilitate even higher growth in the coming quarters. You know, we're thinking quite long term when it comes to our investments in sales and marketing and with the accelerated growth that we've had, it gives us more and more money to invest in that.
From Q3 to Q4 this year, we increased the marketing and sales spend with almost 40% in absolute numbers. We have invested really heavily in Q4 and we think that the effect of that hasn't been seen yet.
Okay. Thank you. Martin, you mentioned there in the presentation that you have switched to IFRS. Could you please just elaborate a bit more on why you have taken that decision?
Yeah, sure. I can just comment on that also and then just add to what Martin said that, the main driver is that we have international investors who are used to this standard and asked us to follow it. That's one part of it. The other part is that each part of the company, we're trying to be best in class, whatever we do. I think that this comes also to the reporting where we set higher standards for the coming reporting. It's sort of in our DNA to try to excel at every level.
Okay. Thank you. Next question. What does it mean that the growth during the quarter is in line with your communicated growth target towards 2025?
I think the main point with that is of course that it gives us comfort both when it comes to that we're on the right track, that we are thinking right when it comes to our strategy of reinvesting in growth, and keeping high gross margins and deliver software that our customers value. I think it gives us comfort that we're on the right track. It also strengthens our confidence in the goals. We have been very confident from start that we will reach half a billion SEK in 2025, and I think this shows in numbers that that's doable.
Okay. Thank you. The final question for this Q&A session, and you mentioned there in the presentation the acquisition of DATACORP, an interesting acquisition, I would say. Could you please elaborate a bit on your view on how DATACORP will fit into Checkin.com's offer as it is right now?
Absolutely. DATACORP is really quite fantastic technology and team working on a AI technology for facial recognition, as I talked about. Our strategy for acquisitions is to acquire technology and teams that adds to our software and makes the product better, especially in the medium to long term. I think we should see the DATACORP acquisition on quite maybe one year or maybe several years perspective, to be honest. We're investing, like I said, heavily in R&D ourselves, and this complements that. The DATACORP technology is around facial recognition of what's called one-to-many. GetID that we acquired last year has a technology that can do matching one to one really well.
You can show your passport, you can take a selfie, and GetID can say, "Yeah, this is the same person." DATACORP adds to that technology by making it possible to match one face out of many, which open up new possibilities in long term when it comes to authentication and logins, but also gives us a technology that we think really enables the software to be improved considerably, even in the medium term. I think I said in my comment that we hope to share some more details on the R&D work that we're doing. For natural reasons, we're not always sharing everything that we're working on.
I think we will communicate a bit more on that and including the DATACORP technologies that are included.
Okay. Thank you. So that was the final question for this Q&A session. A big thank you to Kristoffer and Martin for presenting the last quarter. A big thank you to all the viewers who have sent in questions to us. With that said, I wish you all a good day, and hope to see you again in the coming quarterly presentations. Take care. Bye-bye.
Thank you.