Media reports reveal that Google is acquiring Kaggle, a platform that hosts data science and machine learning competitions. There details about the transaction is not out yet.
TechCrunch who reported the story said Kaggle co-founder CEO Anthony Goldbloom didn’t deny that the acquisition is happening. Google itself declined “to comment on rumors.”
Kaggle, which has about half a million data scientists on its platform, was founded by Goldbloom and Ben Hamner in 2010. With Kaggle, Google is buying one of the largest and most active communities for data scientists — and with that, it will get increased mindshare in this community, too (though it already has plenty of that thanks to Tensorflow and other projects).
Kaggle has a bit of a history with Google, too, but that’s pretty recent. Earlier this month, Google and Kaggle teamed up to host a $100,000 machine learning competition around classifying YouTube videos. That competition had some deep integrations with the Google Cloud Platform.
Google will keep the service running — likely under its current name according to TechCrunch.
