Google is set to acquire Kaggle, an Australia-based data science platform for running coding competition.
The financial details about the acquisition have not been disclosed.
Founded in 2010 by Anthony Goldbloom and Ben Hamner, Kaggle is a platform where data science and machine learning competitions are run.
The platform is being used by more than 800,000 data scientists to explore, analyse and understand the latest updates in machine learning and data analytics.
Kaggle focuses on a small niche segments compared to competitors like DrivenData, TopCoder and HackerRank.
Google Cloud AI and Machine Learning chief scientist Fei-Fei Li said in a post: “Kaggle is the best place to search and analyse public datasets, build machine learning models and grow your data science expertise.
“During my keynote talk at Next ‘17, I emphasised the importance of democratising AI.
“We must lower the barriers of entry to AI and make it available to the largest community of developers, users and enterprises, so they can apply it to their own unique needs. With Kaggle joining the Google Cloud team, we can accelerate this mission.”
Following the deal, Kaggle will continue to support machine learning training and deployment services as well as allow the platform to store and query large datasets.
“Kaggle and Google Cloud will foster a thriving community of machine learning developers and data scientists, giving them direct access to the most advanced cloud machine learning environment,” Li added.
Recently, Google reportedly teamed up with Kaggle for a $100,000 competition of machine learning to classify YouTube videos.
Kaggle has raised $12.75m in two rounds from 11 investors since its launch. It includes Data Collective, Gil Elbaz, Hal Varian, Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Max Levchin, SV Angel, Techammer, TenOneTen Ventures, Yuri Milner and Zetta Venture Partners.
