Home topics start-up-entrepreneur Startup Tech Startup Meet the startup growing globally in the cloud Guest Author November 11, 2011 Kaggle provides statistical and analytical outsourcing via global data modelling competitions to a range of high profile companies, researchers and governments from around the world. With over 11,500 members already, the company is growing fast. Having the right IT system in place is an absolute must for any small business. And for Kaggle it has been instrumental in our short, but fast-paced, journey. In a world where data is being collected faster and in greater volumes than ever before, most modern organisations now support analytics functions – making the potential market opportunity enormous. IDC predicts that $38 billion will be spent on predictive analytics services in 2011. We saw a gap in the market to use a crowdsourced competition model to inspire rapid innovation by introducing the analytics function to a wide audience of experts. Kaggle gives large organisations the opportunity to tap into a global network of data analysts that includes more than 11,000, often PhD-level, specialists from over 200 universities across more than 100 countries. Competitions typically run for 60 days and are scored objectively, based on the accuracy of the predictions. When competitions end, the host organisation receives all intellectual property behind the winning model in exchange for prizes, typically cash. The unique thing about our business model is that we are able to deliver cheaper, faster and more powerful analytics to our customers, who range from banks,