4 ms·
Pretty hard to know unless someone has inside knowledge. You can take a point of reference from the funding history - https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/k
by jwilliams 10y ago
Pretty hard to know unless someone has inside knowledge.
You can take a point of reference from the funding history - https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/kaggle#/entity https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/kaggle#/entity
$11M Nov 2011 followed by 1.75M in Sept 2015. The first was an amazing raise for their stage. Obviously pretty smart people and an area people wanted a part of . Appears the later was a bridging round as it's been tagged Series A like the first.
They laid off 1/3 staff earlier in 2015:
https://www.wired.com/2015/02/data-science-darling-kaggle-cuts-one-third-staff/ https://www.wired.com/2015/02/data-science-darling-kaggle-cu...
That was 7 of 20 roles. They're now more like ~80 employees, according to LinkedIn. However, admittedly a lot aren't tagged right (investors, advisors, interns and people associated with Kaggle). Either way, appears the pivot in 2015 worked.
So you can straight-line from there. That's circa 3-5x employee growth over 3 years, which you can conjecture at least has a relationship with actual growth. That's not too shabby either. With growth over that timeframe and stage you'd probably be more interest in the story over the last 6-12 months, which is harder to gauge. It may have plateaued, it may have spiked.
So if you anchor the Series A at, say, 20% of the value. Then multiply out growth, then put a multiple on that you're looking at 100 at the low end and maybe 500 at the high-end. Likely somewhere square in the middle.
That's guesswork, but gives a ballpark view.
- josephby 10y agoTo me that sounds optimistic. A bearish view would be that they limped to enough revenue to cover the costs of operating a solid recruiting and contest site; non recurring revenue of, say, $15MM without a strong growth or margin story. Kaggle was a great recruiting play; given that Google bought them, and not a recruiting company, I would bet that this is an acquihire.
- jwilliams 10y agoThat's a fair scenario too. If they were covering costs at 15M+, that's not too bad and a pretty serious business. You'd hope for a multiple on that (and the investors would be wanting some level of return too). So for met that puts me a the bottom of my range (~6x multiple). You're right though, they may have just hit a ceiling and the multiple could be a lot lower. I was taking a bit of a punt on what I saw. You've also got to consider the cash component, earn-outs, etc. If you put all that together the 6x or more doesn't seem off-base. It's also the kind of setup that might have multiple people interested in acquiring them. Another more positive read on "ceiling" is that is they wanted to execute on a bigger vision and the Google acquisition gave them the platform to do so.
- one_off 10y agokaggle only has about 12 employees. a lot of folks who are competitors list kaggle as their employer