Kaggle, a San Francisco, Calif.-based platform for predictive data modeling competitions that leverages human intelligence to help companies, governments, and researchers identify solutions to solve large-scale problems, has raised $11m in Series A funding.
The round was led by Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with participation from SV Angel, Yuri Milner’s Start Fund, and the Stanford Management Company, as well as individual investors PayPal Founder Max Levchin, Google Chief Economist Hal Varian, and Applied Semantics’ Co-Founder and Factual CEO Gil Elbaz.
In conjunction with the funding, Neil Rimer, partner at Index Ventures, will join Kaggle’s board of directors. Max Levchin has been named chairman of the company.
Kaggle’s platform for predictive modeling competitions helps organizations and researchers identify solutions to the world’s hardest problems by posting them as competitions to a community of more than 17,000 PhD-level data scientists located around the world.
The scientists who participate in Kaggle competitions develop algorithms to solve large-scale problems and submit iterations of their algorithms throughout each competition. Kaggle maintains a real-time leaderboard of each competition’s standings.
Founded in 2010 by CEO Anthony Goldbloom, the company has already helped NASA, Deloitte, and Ford: It is currently running the $3m Heritage Health Prize to help prevent unnecessary hospitalization.
Kaggle is currently hiring (http://www.kaggle.com/pages/jobs).
FinSMEs
03/11/2011