Palantir Technologies, a Silicon Valley startup that focuses on data mining, raised $450 million in a new fundraising round, the company announced Thursday in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The 11-year-old company, which sells software to government agencies and Wall Street, raised its round at a valuation of $20 billion, according to sources familiar with the matter. Palantir was already the fifth most highly valued startup in The Wall Street Journal’s Billion Dollar Startup Club after Snapchat, Uber Technologies, Airbnb and Xiaomi. The new valuation would make the company the fourth most highly valued startup.
The filing said the company had offered $500 million in stock, of which $50 million remained outstanding. Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC and S F Sentry Securities Inc. are listed as brokers.
The fast-growing company’s last funding round closed in late 2014 at a valuation of $15 billion.
Palantir has raised roughly $1 billion from a diverse group of investors such as the U.S. federal government’s In-Q-Tel, venture-capital firm Founders Fund and hedge fund
The company’s data-mining software lets government agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigations quickly visualize relationships among large amounts of data. The inputs could be anything—phone numbers, bank records, friend lists, photos of license plates. The software reportedly helped the U.S. government track down Osama bin Laden.
According to USAspending.gov, a federal site that publishes government contracts, Palantir since 2009 has received more than $215 million dollars in contracts with the FBI, the Defense Department and Homeland Security. Much of its business also comes from the banking, insurance, retail, healthcare and oil and gas industries.
Palantir’s software grew out of technology developed by PayPal Inc., the online payment platform, whose engineers initially sought to uncover fraud.
