Silicon Valley’s next big thing has nothing to do with digital media or the mobile web.
When Palantir Technologies raised $90 million in VC funding last summer, TechCrunch referred to it as the “next one billion-dollar company.”
Seems a lot can change in a year. Palantir, a Silicon Valley-based provider of analytics platforms for financial and intelligence clients, now is closer to being the next $3 billion company.
Palantir is in the midst of raising new money at a valuation of between $2.5 billion and $3 billion, according to a source familiar with the situation. The deal was first revealed in an SEC filing, which showed $50 million raised so far (only some of which is new equity — the rest appears to be related to an acquisition or possible share conversion).
No investors were listed on the filing, although I’m told that they include Tiger Global Management. Past backers include The Founders Fund, Glynn Capital, In-Q-Tel, Reed Elsevier Ventures, Ulu Ventures, Youniversity Ventures, Jeremy Stoppelman, Ben Ling and what TechCrunch referred to as “a couple of high-profile NY funds” (which may, or may not, have included Tiger).
Palantir doesn’t get the tech press love of its billion-dollar-plus brethren, even though it was founded by a group of Stanford computer scientists and members of the PayPal mafia. Probably has something to do with the fact that it sells to enterprise and government customers, instead of to smartphone-carrying geeks. But the company will pull in well north of $100 million in revenue this year, and recently signed a product partnership with Thomson Reuters.
A Palantir spokeswoman declined to comment.