Palantir Files ‘Confidential’ Plans For Long-Awaited IPO
A week after quietly filing plans to raise $1 billion, big data crunching juggernaut Palantir has announced it’s filed confidential plans for a public listing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Very little information is available beyond Palantir’s statement, which reads: “Palantir Technologies Inc. today announced that it has confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) relating to the proposed public listing of its Class A common stock. The public listing is expected to take place after the SEC completes its review process, subject to market and other conditions.”
Palantir has been building up its government work of late, with major contracts signed with U.S. and U.K. health bodies in fighting the Covid-19 pandemic. The Peter Thiel-backed Silicon Valley company, said to be worth $20 billion, scored multimillion deals with the Health and Human Services (HHS) department and with the U.S. Coast Guard on their respective coronavirus response plans, as Forbes’ breaking reports revealed earlier this year. As with its U.K. National Health Service work, Palantir’s tools were to help track resources such as hospital capacity and ventilator supply. (Via FOIA request, Forbes obtained the contract description for Palantir’s work with the U.S. Coast Guard, which can be found here.)
Its more controversial work, though, came with Immigration Customs Enforcement in the U.S. Criticism was levelled at the company for furnishing the agency with tools to locate and remove illegal immigrants.
Just last week, Palantir filed a Form D with the SEC, revealing plans to raise an additional $960 million. The filing revealed it had already sold $550 million of the shares it was planning to sell.
It continues to do big business with the U.S. government outside of ICE and Covid-19. The SEC itself is a customer, with a contract of $6.7 million signed in June. The same month saw multi-million dollar deals penned with the IRS and the Coast Guard.
It’s been a long wait for Palantir’s public listing, one that’s been rumoured for years. Since its founding in 2004 by academic and CEO Alex Karp, it’s gone from being a government surveillance player to a private industry big data darling. Given it’s raised $2.6 billion privately over the years, expectations will be high for a significant IPO whenever it arrives.