Google is acquiring data science platform Kaggle

In a bid to further boost its machine learning capabilities, Google is acquiring Kaggle, a platform that hosts competitions for researchers and data scientists, reports TechCrunch.

Though at the moment, there are little details available about the acquisition but Google is expected to officially announce the said acquisition at their Cloud Next conference in San Francisco next week.

Founded in 2010 by Goldbloom and Ben Hamner, Kaggle is one of the largest and most active communities for data scientists that currently has more than half a million registered users spanning over 194 countries. They belong to a wide variety of backgrounds, including fields such as computer science, computer vision, biology, medicine, and even glaciology.

Few weeks back, Google and Kaggle partnered to host a $100,000 machine learning competition around classifying YouTube videos. That competition had some deep integrations with the Google Cloud Platform, too. Apparently, Google is expected to keep the platform operational under its current name.

Kaggle has so far had $12.75 million in funding from marquee investors including the likes of Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Max Levchin, Naval Ravikant, and Yuri Milner among others. Both the companies are yet to comment on the reports.