Palantir, the CIA funded US firm that specializes in data mining and analysis, is currently raising a serious round of funding, according to sources close to the company.
Palantir could be looking at raising $400 million through the current round at a valuation of around $15 billion, according to Forbes. Knowledgeable sources have also revealed that fundraising has been ongoing since November; however the company is not short on money and the current effort is a contingency strategy incase of an economic fallout.
Palantir’s technology which has its roots in a PayPal tool developed to flag out fraud, at one point enabled government agencies draw correlation between troves of input data.
Now the firm carries out contract jobs and is a data mining software provider for the world’s largest government agencies, banks and corporations, having raised $500 million in 2014.
Having received initial funding from the CIA venture arm In-Q-Tel, the Wall Street Journal reports, that over $215 million in U.S. government contract work has been awarded to Palantir since 2009, while Forbes estimates that the company took in about $450 million in revenue in 2013. Its current valuation puts it right behind Uber and smartphone maker Xiaomi.
(Image credit: Chema Minguez, via Flickr)
