Drivendata
DrivenData operates an ML competition platform and in-house consulting practice that delivers AI solutions to mission-driven organizations—nonprofits, government agencies, and research institutions—across health, education, conservation, and public services.
- Company typePrivate
- Founded2014
- HeadquartersDenver, United States
- Headcount1–10
- GTM typeB2B
- OfferingServices
What Drivendata does
DrivenData is a Denver-based, privately-held LLC founded in 2014 that operates a dual business model combining a machine learning competition platform with an in-house data science consulting service branded as DrivenDataLABS. The company serves mission-driven organizations—nonprofits, NGOs, government agencies, and research institutions—that need access to data science talent and AI capabilities to advance social impact objectives in health, education, conservation, international development, and public services. The competitions platform mobilizes a global community of data scientists who build predictive models against real-world problems, with winning solutions required to be released under open-source licenses; the consulting team delivers tailored AI solutions for clients with sensitive data or engagement needs that competitions cannot accommodate.
The company has worked with more than 80 organizations across 150+ projects since founding, including the U.S. Department of Energy, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Digital Promise, City of Boston, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, IDEO.org, and Airtel. DrivenData maintains widely-adopted open-source tools—Cookiecutter Data Science, the Deon ethics checklist, and Zamba wildlife monitoring—and in 2026 launched the K-12 AI Infrastructure Platform as the technical implementation partner in Digital Promise's $26 million education AI program. Revenue is generated through professional services contracts for competition hosting and bespoke AI consulting, with no disclosed venture capital or institutional equity funding beyond a $256,000 National Science Foundation grant in 2021.
The underlying technology stack covers six AI modalities—structured data, text, image, video, audio, and multimodal—with demonstrated capabilities including fine-tuned ASR models (Qwen3-ASR, WavLM) surpassing Whisper baselines by 50%+ in children's speech, computer vision for wildlife and satellite imagery, NLP benchmarks (SAGE for science answer grading), and process-automation pipelines for civic and education applications. Competition prize pools have ranged from $30,000 (literacy screening) to $675,000 (U.S. PETs Prize Challenge), with funding sourced primarily from philanthropic foundations and federal agencies.
Drivendata firmographics
Firmographics- Name
- Drivendata
- Legal name
- DrivenData LLC
- Website
- https://drivendata.org
- Company type
- Private
- Founded year
- 2014
- Operating status
- Operating
- Headcount range
- 1–10 employees
- Short description
- DrivenData operates an ML competition platform and in-house consulting practice that delivers AI solutions to mission-driven organizations—nonprofits, government agencies, and research institutions—across health, education, conservation, and public services.
- Ownership category
- akta.pro rank
Drivendata industry classification
Industry- Product category
- Social Impact AI Services
- NAICS
- Computer Systems Design and Related Services (54151)
- SIC
- Services-Computer Programming, Data Processing, Etc. (7370)
- akta.pro primary industry
- Learning Data Infrastructure & Interoperability (LRS, xAPI/LTI/OneRoster, Data Pipelines) (EDAFAFAJ)
- akta.pro secondary industries
- Enterprise AI Data & Knowledge Platforms (Vector Databases, Knowledge Graphs) (HDAEANAH), AI-Powered Tutoring & Study Assistant Platforms (EDANAGAD)
Keywords
Where Drivendata is headquartered
LocationHeadquarters
- HQ city
- Denver
- HQ country
- United States
- HQ region
- North America
Offices1 record
Markets served
Drivendata business model
Business model- GTM type
- B2B
- Offering type
- Services
- Cost components
- Personnel, Technology or R&D, Operations, Marketing or Sales
Revenue model
- Competition Hosting Services: Organizations partner with DrivenData to host machine learning competitions. DrivenData designs competitions, manages participants, and delivers solution models.
- AI Solutions and Consulting: In-house team of data scientists and engineers deliver tailored AI solutions for mission-driven organizations with flexible needs or sensitive data
Pricing tiers
| Model | Billing | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Other | Multi-year contract | Competition hosting for organizations |
Go-to-market motion2 records
Distribution channels3 records
Marketing channels5 records
Drivendata product offering
Product offeringCore offering
DrivenData operates an online platform that hosts machine learning competitions mobilizing a global community of AI talent to solve social impact challenges for mission-driven organizations. Through its DrivenDataLABS arm, an in-house team of data scientists and engineers also delivers tailored AI solutions directly for organizations with sensitive data or complex needs. The company further maintains a portfolio of open-source tools (Cookiecutter Data Science, Deon ethics checklist, Zamba wildlife monitoring) and operates the K-12 AI Infrastructure Platform for education AI.
Product overview
DrivenData operates as a dual offering company combining an online competition platform with an in-house consulting service. The core DrivenData Competitions Platform mobilizes a global community of AI talent through machine learning competitions addressing social impact challenges in health, education, conservation, disasters, civic, energy, and development. The in-house DrivenDataLABS team provides tailored AI solutions for organizations with sensitive data or complex needs. The company maintains multiple open-source projects including Cookiecutter Data Science, Deon ethics checklist, and Zamba wildlife monitoring tool. In 2026, DrivenData launched the K-12 AI Infrastructure Platform in partnership with Digital Promise, providing open education datasets, benchmarks (including SAGE for answer grading), and challenges for education AI development. Competition winners are required to release solutions under MIT license, and the company has shared prize-winning solutions openly on GitHub.
Differentiator
Problem solved
Functional benefit
Brands
- Zamba: Open source wildlife monitoring application developed from winning competition solutions for identifying wildlife in video footage.
- Deon
- Cookiecutter Data Science
Products and services
- DrivenData Competitions Platform Primary online platform hosting machine learning competitions where data scientists develop predictive models to solve social impact challenges in health, education, conservation, disasters, civic services, energy, and international development. Target customers are mission-driven organizations (nonprofits, NGOs, foundations) and government agencies.
- DrivenDataLABS In-house team of experienced data scientists and engineers providing tailored AI solutions for organizations with flexible needs or sensitive data sources that are not suited for public competitions. Engages directly with mission-driven organizations.
- K-12 AI Infrastructure Platform Platform providing open education datasets, AI benchmarks, and challenges for developing AI models that serve K-12 students and educators. Launched with Digital Promise as part of a $26 million K-12 AI Infrastructure Program.
- Cookiecutter Data Science Open-source project providing a standardized directory structure for organizing data science projects to ensure reproducibility, collaboration, and ease of understanding.
- Deon Ethics Checklist Open-source command-line tool providing an easy-to-use ethics checklist integrated into data science projects, helping teams address privacy, bias, and downstream impacts.
- Zamba Wildlife Monitoring Open-source application for identifying wildlife in video footage, built using winning solutions from a DrivenData competition with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
Quantifiable outcome
- Algorithmic approach discovers 25% more restaurant health violations
- +2 more outcomes
Companies that use Drivendata
Customer profileNamed customers9 records
Segments4 records
Ideal customer profiles4 records
Drivendata technology and API
TechnologyTechnology focussed Yes
API detail
- Has API
- No
- API docs
- API detail
Core technology
AI maturity
App detail
AI capability14 records
Feature3 records
Drivendata partnerships and signals
Strategic signalPartnerships
Seven partnerships are on record, tiered core and flagship.
- National Tutoring ObservatorycoreProvided real human tutoring transcripts for the Trace the Ace challenge on the K-12 AI Infrastructure Platform. Partners to build AI models that understand tutoring transcripts and predict student outcomes.
- SNOMED InternationalcoreCollaboration on SNOMED CT Entity Linking Benchmark - a benchmark for linking text in medical notes to entities in SNOMED Clinical Taxonomy
- U.S. Department of EnergyflagshipJoined DOE's Genesis Mission - a national AI initiative to accelerate scientific discovery, enhance national security, and drive energy innovation. DrivenData is one of 24 partner organizations in this public-private partnership.
- Digital PromiseflagshipCore partner in K-12 AI Infrastructure Program - a $26 million initiative to create openly shared AI models, datasets, and benchmarks for education. DrivenData serves as technical implementation partner for the program.
- Learning Data InsightscoreCore partner in K-12 AI Infrastructure Program focused on formative assessments and education AI infrastructure development
- Massive Data Institute at Georgetown UniversitycoreCore partner in K-12 AI Infrastructure Program providing research and data expertise for education AI development
- Catalyst @ Penn GSEcoreCore partner in K-12 AI Infrastructure Program bringing education research expertise from University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education
Scale indicators6 records
Recent moves5 records
Expansion highlights6 records
Drivendata competitors and assessment
Company assessmentDirect peers
- Kaggle: Kaggle is the largest data science competition platform in the world, owned by Google. It directly competes with DrivenData's competitions platform for data scientist mindshare and crowdsourced ML talent, though Kaggle is commercial-focused while DrivenData is social-impact focused.
- Omdena: Omdena runs collaborative AI builds, including 'AI for Social Good' projects that bring together global communities of engineers to solve mission-driven problems, directly overlapping with DrivenData's social impact AI model and community approach.
- Zindi: Zindi hosts data science competitions focused on African and emerging market challenges, operating a community-led competition model very similar to DrivenData, though with a regional focus and predominantly African data science community.
- AIcrowd: AIcrowd (now part of the ETH AI Center ecosystem) is an open community for crowdsourced AI challenges and competitions, offering a peer platform to DrivenData for hosting ML competitions with academic and research audiences.
- Topcoder: Topcoder operates a global crowdsourcing marketplace that historically hosted algorithm and data science competitions; while broader in scope (including software development), it competes with DrivenData for crowdsourced data science talent.
- Numerai: Numerai runs a crowdsourced machine learning competition platform where data scientists build models to predict financial markets, applying a community-led, prize-based competition model similar to DrivenData's core offering.
- HeroX: HeroX, spun out of XPRIZE, operates a crowdsourced innovation challenge platform, competing for the same corporate, government, and nonprofit challenge-sponsoring customers that DrivenData serves.
Broad incumbents
- DataRobot: DataRobot is an enterprise AI/ML platform that competes for the same organizational AI buyers as DrivenData's DrivenDataLABS consulting arm, though it sells software licenses to enterprises rather than delivering social impact solutions.
- Dataiku: Dataiku provides an enterprise AI and machine learning platform used by large organizations to operationalize AI; it overlaps with DrivenData in the data science tooling and consulting space, though at a much larger commercial scale.
Emerging players
- CrowdAI: CrowdAI (now part of Rio Tinto) provides a crowdsourced platform for mapping and computer vision challenges, sharing DrivenData's crowdsourced ML competition model and image/AI focus, though with a narrower domain emphasis on geospatial and industrial applications.
Market position
Strengths4 records
Weaknesses4 records
Competitive moat5 records
Key risks5 records
Key highlights6 records
Customer concentration
Drivendata social profiles
Digital presenceDrivendata financial estimates
Financial estimateRevenue estimate
Valuation estimate
Drivendata leadership team
Management profileNumber of profiles
Profiles3 records
Drivendata funding detail
Funding detailFunding overview
Funding rounds1 record
Investors1 record
Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Drivendata M&A and investment
M&A and investmentM&A
Investments
M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Frequently asked questions about Drivendata
What does Drivendata do?
DrivenData operates an online platform that hosts machine learning competitions mobilizing a global community of AI talent to solve social impact challenges for mission-driven organizations. Through its DrivenDataLABS arm, an in-house team of data scientists and engineers also delivers tailored AI solutions directly for organizations with sensitive data or complex needs. The company further maintains a portfolio of open-source tools (Cookiecutter Data Science, Deon ethics checklist, Zamba wildlife monitoring) and operates the K-12 AI Infrastructure Platform for education AI.
Is Drivendata a public or private company?
Drivendata is a private company. It is classified as founder individual operated bootstrapped and is currently operating.
When was Drivendata founded?
Drivendata was founded in 2014. It employs 1 to 10 people.
Where is Drivendata based?
Drivendata is headquartered in Denver, United States, in the North America region.
How does Drivendata make money?
Two revenue lines are on record. Competition Hosting Services are the primary driver. The others are AI Solutions and Consulting.
Who are Drivendata's main competitors?
Direct peers on record are Kaggle, Omdena, Zindi, AIcrowd, Topcoder, Numerai and HeroX. Broad incumbents are DataRobot and Dataiku. CrowdAI is listed as an emerging player.
Does Drivendata have an API?
No public API is recorded for Drivendata.
What industry is Drivendata in?
Drivendata's product category is Social Impact AI Services. Its primary akta.pro industry code is EDAFAFAJ, Learning Data Infrastructure & Interoperability (LRS, xAPI/LTI/OneRoster, Data Pipelines), with a secondary code of HDAEANAH, Enterprise AI Data & Knowledge Platforms (Vector Databases, Knowledge Graphs). Its NAICS code is 54151 and its SIC code is 7370.