Google confirms acquisition of data science startup Kaggle

At its Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco today, Google announced that it has acquired Kaggle, a startup whose website has hosted competitions in which data scientists solve challenges that other companies provide. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Kaggle competitions have historically provided one way for data scientists to stand out in the crowd in order to get jobs. Now it’s part of Google. But Kaggle’s team will stay together, and Kaggle will keep operating and running competitions — as a distinct brand under the Google Cloud.

“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,” Fei-Fei Li, chief scientist of Google Cloud AI and Machine Learning, wrote in a blog post.

Kaggle gets something out of the deal, too.

“Making Google Cloud technology available to our community will allow us to offer access to powerful infrastructure, scalable training and deployment services and the ability to store and query large data sets,” Kaggle cofounder and chief executive Anthony Goldbloom wrote in his own blog post.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, the two public clouds that are bigger than the Google Cloud, also offer data science services. Google Cloud already provides the Cloud Machine Learning Engine, among other managed services for working with data.

TechCrunch reported on the acquisition yesterday.