Palantir Technologies Readies Bid To Go Public

Palantir Technologies, the Palo Alto, California-based Big Data analytics company, is planning to go public soon and could be trading as early as this fall, sources told Bloomberg News.

Two weeks ago, CEO Alex Karp told Axios on HBO that his Silicon Valley company took its time to seek an initial public offering (IPO) because it wanted to build confidence in its products.

“We were building products and we needed to kind of get enough of them out so that people would see the robustness of our company internally and externally,” he said. “As opposed to every other tech company in the Valley, our plans, if anything, were stronger.”

Co-founded in 2004 by billionaire Peter Thiel, the company has contracted with the U.S. government to identify terrorists and track illegal immigrants. 

Critics of the company have alleged its surveillance software has been used to abuse privacy and sparked protests. 

Government agencies worldwide use Palantir to compile and search for data to track the spread of COVID-19. 

Five years ago, investors valued Palantir at $20 billion, but it was unclear Friday (June 12) what valuation it will seek in an IPO, the report said. 

Palantir declined to comment.

Negotiations over the IPO comes as Palantir expects to generate $1 billion in revenue this year and break even for the first time in its 16-year history, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg.

The pandemic has boosted Palantir, particularly with businesses using the products to help determine how to reopen.

This week, PYMNTS reported that the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) provided Palantir with volumes of personal information, according to the 37-page contract that was published online.

The data sharing deal was published online by London-based openDemocracy, which calls itself an independent political group, and Foxglove, a London law firm. 

“The contracts show that the companies involved, including Faculty and Palantir, were originally granted intellectual property rights (including the creation of databases), and were allowed to train their models and profit off their unprecedented access to NHS data,” openDemocracy Editor-in-Chief Mary Fitzgerald and Foxglove Founding Director and attorney Cori Crider wrote in a blog post.

Holly Searle, a Faculty spokeswoman, has asked that the contract be amended to make clear it will derive no commercial benefit from any software developed during the project and that the use of the intellectual property is under the NHS control.