Kaggle

Kaggle began as a start-up in Melbourne; co-founder Goldbloom had previously worked as an economic modeller at the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Australian Treasury. The company’s original idea was to obtain live data from businesses, hand it to contestants to analyze, and reward the best solution with prize money. Its first competition was a light-hearted contest to predict the voting in the Eurovision Song Contest.⁠[1][2][3][3][3][4]

Early seed funding came from Australian investors led by economist Nicholas Gruen, who served as the first chairman; two participants in early contests were hired as technology advisers, including Melbourne software entrepreneur Jeremy Howard. Goldbloom later said Kaggle first proved its model worked with an HIV research competition, in which contestants outdid four years of research in a week and a half.⁠[3][3][5]

In November 2011 Kaggle announced a Series A round of about $11 million with participation from Index Ventures, Khosla VenturesKhosla VenturesKhosla Ventures (KV) is an American venture capital firm founded in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, and headquartered in Menlo Park, California. It made heavy early bets on clean technology, became OpenAI’s first venture capital investor in 2019, and its portfolio also includes companies such as DoorDash, Block (formerly Square), Impossible Foods, and Rocket Lab.Open the full entry and others; PayPalPayPalPayPal Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: PYPL) is an American digital payments company that operates payment brands including PayPal, Venmo, Braintree, and Xoom, providing online and in-store payments, money transfers, and consumer credit to consumers and merchants worldwide.Open the full entry co-founder Max Levchin became chairman, and the company was moving to San Francisco to expand. The platform had about 17,000 contestants at the time, with clients including Ford, Wikipedia, Deloitte and NASA; it charged businesses $10,000 a month to run competitions, and chief data scientist Jeremy Howard said the plan was to take a percentage of each prize once it scaled up. The largest prize was a $3 million competition put up by Heritage Provider Network to predict patterns in medical records; for projects involving sensitive data, Kaggle held private competitions open only to pre-screened contestants.⁠[5][3][3][3][3][5][5][3][5][5]

On March 7, 2017, news emerged that Google would acquire Kaggle; at the time the platform had about half a million data scientists and, besides competitions, offered “kernels” (previously called scripts) for sharing analysis source code, as well as a job board. According to Crunchbase data, Kaggle had raised $12.5 million since 2010 from investors including Index Ventures, SV AngelSV AngelSV Angel is a San Francisco venture capital firm cofounded in 2009 by angel investor Ron Conway and former Google executive David Lee. It typically writes small follow-on checks in seed rounds and has invested in companies such as Airbnb, Pinterest, and Dropbox; in 2018 it said it would no longer raise new funds from outside investors, and from 2022 it set up growth funds.Open the full entry, Max Levchin, Naval RavikantNaval RavikantNaval Ravikant is an entrepreneur and angel investor and a co-founder of AngelList. Early on he co-founded the review site Epinions; he and Babak Nivi later grew AngelList out of the startup-fundraising blog Venture Hacks, and he co-founded the cryptocurrency hedge fund MetaStable Capital and Spearhead, which backs founders to make angel investments. His views on startups and life were compiled into the book The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.Open the full entry, Google chief economist Hal Varian, Khosla Ventures and Yuri Milner.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1]

On March 8, Google announced the acquisition at its Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco without disclosing the terms. Fei-Fei Li, then chief scientist of AI and machine learning at Google Cloud, wrote a post welcoming Kaggle to Google Cloud, describing it as home to the world’s largest community of data scientists and machine learning enthusiasts, with more than 800,000 data experts exploring and analyzing data on the platform, and saying the move would accelerate the mission of democratizing AI; Kaggle and Google Cloud would continue to support machine learning training and deployment while offering the community the ability to store and query large datasets.⁠[6][2][2][2][2]

In 2022 Kaggle co-founders Anthony Goldbloom and Ben Hamner stepped down as CEO and CTO respectively, and D. Sculley, a former director of engineering at Google Brain, took over as CEO. In his farewell post Goldbloom wrote that of Kaggle’s almost 10 million users, 1.1 million had submitted to the Titanic getting-started competition, almost 1 million had completed exercises from Kaggle’s courses, and 18,700 college courses had run classroom competitions on the platform; he also said Kaggle had given people another credential for breaking into machine learning, noting that Facebook was already using Kaggle to find talent in 2012 and that companies such as NVIDIA and H2O.ai hire teams of Kaggle Grandmasters.⁠[4][4][4][4][4]

In April 2025 Kaggle partnered with the Wikimedia Foundation to host Wikimedia Enterprise’s beta release of structured Wikipedia data in French and English, formatted specifically for machine learning. Kaggle then had more than 461,000 freely accessible datasets.⁠[7][7][7]

In August 2025 Google DeepMindGoogle DeepMindGoogle DeepMind is Google’s artificial intelligence research organization, formed in April 2023 by merging DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014, with the Brain team from Google Research, and led by CEO Demis Hassabis. It developed AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and the Gemini family of models, and Hassabis and John Jumper received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold’s protein structure prediction work.Open the full entry and Kaggle launched Kaggle Game Arena, a public AI benchmarking platform where AI models compete head to head in strategic games, addressing problems with traditional benchmarks such as models possibly remembering answers and scores near 100 percent no longer revealing meaningful differences. The platform is built on Kaggle; the harnesses connecting models to game environments and the environments themselves are open source, and final rankings use an all-play-all system with over a hundred matches between every pair of models. The first game was chess, with an exhibition among eight frontier models on August 5.⁠[8][8][8][8][8][8]

In February 2026 Kaggle Game Arena added two new benchmarks: Werewolf, a team-based social deduction game played through natural language that tests communication and negotiation, and poker, which tests risk management and the quantification of uncertainty. Google DeepMind said Gemini 3 Pro and Gemini 3 Flash then had the top Elo ratings on the chess leaderboard.⁠[9][9][9][9][9][9]

Kaggle: Official website: https://www.kaggle.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[9]