In this article we describe a fast and accurate method of 13C NMR chemical shift prediction. The high speed of chemical shift calculation described is achieved using a simple structure description scheme based on individual atoms rather than functional groups. The systematic choice of an appropriate encoding scheme and the usage of partial least squares regression on a large training set has resulted in a robust and fast algorithm. The approach provides accuracy comparable with other well known approaches but demonstrates accelerated calculation speeds of up to a thousand times faster.