Kaggle closes its Series A round

I know you’re all on the edges of your seats about how Kaggle is going.

The answer is “very well”. We’ve just announced the closure of Series A funding.

And you can read all about it in the New York Times, the Independent or Gigaom.

Further information from our newsletter below the fold: 

Kaggle is excited to announce that we’ve raised $11 million in Series A financing led by Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures. Stanford University’s endownment, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, Google chief economist Hal Varian and Applied Semantics’ (now Google Adsense) co-founder Gil Elbaz also participated in the round. Neil Rimer, partner at Index Ventures, will join Kaggle’s board of directors and Max Levchin has been named chairman of the company. (See early coverage in the New York Times, Techcrunch, AllThingsD, Gigaom, Business InsiderVenture Beat.and The Independent.)

Our vision is to grow Kaggle into a hive buzzing with enough public and private competitions to support hundreds or thousands of data scientists relying on Kaggle for their full-time incomes. In the coming months, we will be announcing a new raft of public competitions, as well as beginning to invite some of the best and brightest Kaggle players to compete in private competitions. Although the winners of private competitions get the most prize money, all private competition players are guaranteed prize money for participating.

Kaggle is Hiring

Wonder what it was like to be one of the first ten employees at Google, Facebook or Apple? Now that we’re funded, Kaggle is looking to hire technical sales folk, data scientists and developers. If you can translate geek-speak into pinstripe explanations of business return on investment, are a maestro of modeling or can write fast robust and beautiful code, send your resume and note to me: anthony.goldbloom@kaggle.com. Extra points if you’ve entered one or more Kaggle competitions. You can also read more on our new jobs page.

Site Redesign

You’ve probably noticed that we spruced up the website. For people who might want to create and host competitions, we’ve created a video to explain how Kaggle competitions work, along with some case studies of previous competitions. In the coming weeks and months, we’ll be making the site more searchable and intuitive, and adding resources for players and hosts to find and create the competitions that are right for them.

 

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Richard Tsukamasa Green

My sister in law just emailed me a link to an article about Kaggle saying it sounded cool. Seems everyone is cottoning on.

When I first started looking into comparative corporate governance in my Honours year, the way innovative start ups could attract funding was always the most interesting thing about the American model. I’m glad that’s still true.

David Walker
David Walker
13 years ago

Nick, between Kaggle and Peach, you are now officially Exhibit 1 against the business people I run into from time to time who explain that economists have no idea how busines works in the real world, couldn’t ever build something, etc etc

Patrick
13 years ago

Great stuff.

David, he may just be the exception that proves the rule?

Richard Tsukamasa Green

I was struck by this passage in the SMH piece.

When he was at the RBA he entered an essay competition at The Economist magazine and won. His piece posited that the subprime mortgage crisis wasn’t a big deal.

That was a prime example of why crowdsourcing is often a good idea, i.e even choosing a very smart person doesn’t get you the right answer, sometimes you need to ask a lot of smart people and see which is best.