AIcrowd
AIcrowd operates a digital crowdsourcing platform that enables organizations to host AI and machine learning challenges, connecting challenge organizers like universities and corporations with a global community of AI/ML researchers who submit solutions for prizes.
- Company typePrivate
- Founded2018
- HeadquartersLausanne, Switzerland
- Headcount11–50
- GTM typeB2B
- OfferingSoftware
What AIcrowd does
AIcrowd is a private Swiss company headquartered at EPFL Innovation Park in Lausanne that operates a digital crowdsourcing platform for organizing computational and AI/ML challenges. Founded in 2018 with 11-50 employees, the company serves a two-sided market: challenge organizers (universities, research institutions, and corporate sponsors) who need infrastructure to host competitions, and AI/ML researchers, data scientists, and practitioners who submit solutions in exchange for prizes and recognition. Named organizing customers include Imperial College London's Computational Privacy Group (Insurance Pricing Game), MIT (Neural MMO), Intelligent Environments Lab (Citylearn), and AWS (NeurIPS 2025 Trainium workshop), with prize sponsorship from PartnerRe, SwissRe, and multiple actuarial societies.
The platform's core product is the AIcrowd Platform, comprising challenge management, participant tracking, dual leaderboard evaluation, and submission handling, with adjacent tooling including a CLI for programmatic submissions, a Discourse forum, a self-hosted GitLab for code repositories, and a Google Colaboratory integration that lowers participation friction. AIcrowd Research operates as a sub-brand running a fellowship program for collaborative problem design. The platform has hosted marquee competitions such as the NeurIPS 2022/2023 Neural MMO Challenge (multi-agent reinforcement learning with $20,000 in prize money), the NeurIPS 2023 Citylearn Challenge (building energy optimization), and the Insurance Pricing Game, which drew over 10,000 registered participants from 45+ countries and produced 10,500+ submissions against a 100K-policy historical car insurance dataset with a cheapest-wins market simulation mechanic.
The business model is freemium for participants, with revenue derived from two streams: challenge hosting services paid by organizers, and potentially transaction fees on reward payments processed from organizers to winners. No pricing tiers are publicly disclosed and no funding rounds or revenue figures have been reported, consistent with a founder-owned operating posture. Go-to-market is event-driven (NeurIPS, AWS re:Invent) and community-led (Discord, Discourse, blog, Twitter), with participant acquisition driven by challenge visibility and organizer reputation rather than direct sales motion.
AIcrowd firmographics
Firmographics- Name
- AIcrowd
- Legal name
- AIcrowd Ltd
- Website
- https://aicrowd.com
- Company type
- Private
- Founded year
- 2018
- Operating status
- Operating
- Headcount range
- 11–50 employees
- Short description
- AIcrowd operates a digital crowdsourcing platform that enables organizations to host AI and machine learning challenges, connecting challenge organizers like universities and corporations with a global community of AI/ML researchers who submit solutions for prizes.
- Ownership category
- akta.pro rank
AIcrowd industry classification
Industry- Product category
- AI/ML Competition and Crowdsourcing Platform
- NAICS
- Convention and Trade Show Organizers (56192)
- SIC
- Services-Prepackaged Software (7372)
- akta.pro primary industry
- Ticketing, Registration & Event Technology (Badging, Apps) (BPAFAGAL)
- akta.pro secondary industry
- Virtual Event Registration, Ticketing & Access Control (Authentication, Paywalls, Badging) (THAHAOAI)
Keywords
Where AIcrowd is headquartered
LocationHeadquarters
- HQ city
- Lausanne
- HQ country
- Switzerland
- HQ region
- Europe
Offices1 record
Markets served
AIcrowd business model
Business model- GTM type
- B2B
- Offering type
- Software
- Cost components
- Personnel, Technology or R&D, Marketing or Sales, Operations, Infrastructure
Revenue model
- Challenge Hosting Services: AIcrowd provides a platform for organizations (Organizers) to host computational challenges. While the platform appears free for participants, Organizers may pay for challenge hosting services. The platform facilitates reward payments from Organizers to participants.
- Reward Processing: AIcrowd may take a role in processing reward payments from Organizers to Challenge winners, potentially earning transaction fees for this service.
Go-to-market motion2 records
Distribution channels3 records
Marketing channels6 records
AIcrowd product offering
Product offeringCore offering
AIcrowd operates a digital crowdsourcing platform that enables organizations to organize and run machine learning and AI computational challenges. Organizers pay to host challenges on the platform, while global participants submit solutions for evaluation against leaderboards and compete for rewards funded by organizers and sponsors. The platform provides challenge management, submission evaluation, dual leaderboards, market simulation engines, and reward distribution infrastructure.
Product overview
AIcrowd is a digital crowdsourcing platform that allows entities to organize and run computational challenges. The core offering consists of the AIcrowd Platform with the Challenges system for hosting machine learning and AI competitions. The platform provides a CLI tool for programmatic submissions, a Discourse forum for community discussions, and a GitLab instance for code sharing. AIcrowd Research extends the platform with a fellowship program for collaborative research. The platform supports various challenge formats including educational challenges, research competitions, and blitz events, often in partnership with academic institutions and major conferences like NeurIPS.
Differentiator
Problem solved
Functional benefit
Products and services
- AIcrowd Platform A digital crowdsourcing platform that allows organizations to organize and run computational AI/ML challenges. It provides tools for challenge management, participant tracking, leaderboard systems, submission evaluation, and reward distribution. It is used by universities, research institutions, insurance companies, and technology firms to crowdsource AI solutions at global scale.
- Insurance Pricing Game A market simulation challenge where participants act as insurance companies building pricing models to compete in a cheapest-wins market. Features dual leaderboards for RMSE and competitive profit evaluation, with a dataset of 60K-100K historical car insurance policies over five years. Sponsored by PartnerRe, Singapore Actuarial Society, Institut des Actuaires, and Actuartech.
- NeurIPS Challenges A collection of research-focused AI/ML competitions hosted on the AIcrowd platform in conjunction with the NeurIPS conference. Includes the NeurIPS 2023 Citylearn Challenge for advanced building control and grid resilience (co-organized with Intelligent Environments Lab), the Neural MMO Challenge for multi-agent reinforcement learning (co-organized with MIT), and other research competitions.
Quantifiable outcome
- Over 10,500 submissions received in single Insurance Pricing Game challenge
- +3 more outcomes
Companies that use AIcrowd
Customer profileNamed customers5 records
Segments3 records
Ideal customer profiles2 records
AIcrowd technology and API
TechnologyTechnology focussed Yes
API detail
- Has API
- No
- API docs
- API detail
Core technology
AI maturity
App detail
Integration11 records
Feature3 records
AIcrowd partnerships and signals
Strategic signalPartnerships
Six partnerships are on record, tiered core and minor.
- AWS (Amazon Web Services)coreAWS is hosting a hands-on chess-focused AI workshop at NeurIPS 2025 where participants will fine-tune Qwen-based language models to play chess. AIcrowd is a partner alongside AGI House for this workshop showcasing AWS Trainium capabilities. A version is also planned for AWS re:Invent in December.
- AGI HouseminorAGI House is co-hosting the AWS Trainium chess workshop at NeurIPS 2025 with AWS and AIcrowd.
- MITcoreMIT is a co-organizer for the NeurIPS 2022 and 2023 Neural MMO Challenges hosted on AIcrowd platform, working with Parametrix.ai and other partners.
- Intelligent Environments LabcoreIntelligent Environments Lab co-organizes the NeurIPS 2023 Citylearn Challenge with AIcrowd for advanced building control and grid resilience research.
- Imperial College LondoncoreImperial College London's Computational Privacy Group organizes the Insurance Pricing Game on AIcrowd, providing real insurance data and actuarial expertise.
- AI for Good - ITUminorAI for Good ITU partnered with AIcrowd to organize AI Blitz challenges for educational purposes.
Scale indicators5 records
Recent moves5 records
Expansion highlights5 records
AIcrowd competitors and assessment
Company assessmentDirect peers
- Kaggle: Kaggle (owned by Google) is the dominant crowdsourcing platform for ML/AI competitions, serving both researchers and enterprise organizers. Direct overlap with AIcrowd's core challenge hosting business, though Kaggle operates at vastly larger scale and offers integrated compute resources.
- HeroX: HeroX is a crowdsourcing competition platform (spun out of XPRIZE) hosting innovation and technical challenges with prize purses. Comparable challenge-hosting business model and organizer value proposition, though less specialized in ML/AI.
- Zindi: Zindi operates a data science competition platform primarily serving African markets, with similar challenge hosting infrastructure and crowdsourcing mechanics to AIcrowd. Comparable business model targeting ML practitioners and enterprise organizers.
- EvalAI: EvalAI is an open-source platform for hosting and evaluating AI challenges, originating from CloudCV/Georgia Tech. Directly comparable challenge hosting capability, though operates more as research infrastructure than a commercial platform.
- DrivenData: DrivenData hosts data science competitions focused on social impact, partnering with research institutions and NGOs. Comparable to AIcrowd's mission-driven challenge hosting and academic organizer relationships, with similar scale and prize structures.
Emerging players
- HackerRank: HackerRank is a competitive programming and technical assessment platform increasingly adding AI/ML challenge formats. Overlaps with AIcrowd in hosting ML coding competitions, though AIcrowd has stronger specialization in research-grade AI challenges.
- CodaLab: CodaLab is an open-source platform for computational research, including competitions and reproducible experiments. Academic-oriented competitor with similar challenge hosting functionality, particularly in ML research communities.
Broad incumbents
- Topcoder: Topcoder is an established crowdsourcing platform for competitive programming, data science, and design challenges. Broader scope than AIcrowd but operates similar challenge hosting, prize-based competition, and community mechanics for technical problem-solving.
- Innocentive (Wazoku): Wazoku (formerly Innocentive) is an enterprise crowdsourcing and innovation challenge platform serving corporate R&D teams. Comparable challenge-hosting business model targeting enterprise organizers, though broader scope beyond AI/ML.
Others
- OpenML: OpenML is an open platform for sharing datasets, algorithms, and experiments in machine learning. Adjacent to AIcrowd's challenge platform with overlap in ML research infrastructure, though focuses on dataset sharing rather than competitive challenges.
Market position
Strengths5 records
Weaknesses5 records
Competitive moat4 records
Key risks6 records
Key highlights7 records
Customer concentration
AIcrowd social profiles
Digital presenceAIcrowd financial estimates
Financial estimateRevenue estimate
Valuation estimate
AIcrowd leadership team
Management profileNumber of profiles
Profiles7 records
AIcrowd funding detail
Funding detailFunding overview
Funding rounds
Investors
Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
AIcrowd 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 AIcrowd
What does AIcrowd do?
AIcrowd operates a digital crowdsourcing platform that enables organizations to organize and run machine learning and AI computational challenges. Organizers pay to host challenges on the platform, while global participants submit solutions for evaluation against leaderboards and compete for rewards funded by organizers and sponsors. The platform provides challenge management, submission evaluation, dual leaderboards, market simulation engines, and reward distribution infrastructure.
Is AIcrowd a public or private company?
AIcrowd is a private company. It is classified as founder individual operated bootstrapped and is currently operating.
When was AIcrowd founded?
AIcrowd was founded in 2018. It employs 11 to 50 people.
Where is AIcrowd based?
AIcrowd is headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland, in the Europe region.
How does AIcrowd make money?
Two revenue lines are on record. Challenge Hosting Services are the primary driver. The others are reward Processing.
Who are AIcrowd's main competitors?
Direct peers on record are Kaggle, HeroX, Zindi, EvalAI and DrivenData. Emerging players are HackerRank and CodaLab. Broad incumbents are Topcoder and Innocentive (Wazoku). OpenML is listed as an others.
Does AIcrowd have an API?
No public API is recorded for AIcrowd.
What industry is AIcrowd in?
AIcrowd's product category is AI/ML Competition and Crowdsourcing Platform. Its primary akta.pro industry code is BPAFAGAL, Ticketing, Registration & Event Technology (Badging, Apps), with a secondary code of THAHAOAI, Virtual Event Registration, Ticketing & Access Control (Authentication, Paywalls, Badging). Its NAICS code is 56192 and its SIC code is 7372.