Portrait of a mysterious startup backed by the US Intelligence Agency: Valued up to $ 20 billion but little known, co-founder is a ‘mafia boss’ in Silicon Valley

During the 17 years since its inception, Palantir Techonologies has achieved remarkable results that not all startups have achieved: They receive financial support from the US Intelligence Agency (CIA), which is one of the companies. The most valuable private sector in the US, won a seat in the meeting between President Donald Trump and major technology companies.

But this Silicon Valley-based data analysis company is a mystery. What everyone knows is that they are doing some controversial work with the US government. The company itself has also tried to hide its identity. CEO and co-founder Alex Karp recently explained in an interview with HBO that the reason for this is because customers often ask them to remain silent. For now, things may be different when Palantir may have to disclose a few points in its operations as the company is approaching the US IPO.

Palantir said this week that it confidently applied for an IPO with the US Stock Exchange. As a publicly traded company, Palantir will need to reveal more financial history and be more open to investors’ scrutiny. And for any technology company of this size – worth about $ 20 billion – an IPO will be a lot of attention.

“If the IPO, Palantir will become a remarkable event in the technology village, very similar to other names like Uber and Lyft – the companies were privately owned for many years after the IPO,” said Danial Ives – a professional. analyst said.

Named after the globe in the popular series “The Lord of the Rings”, Palantir is based in Palo Alto, California. The company has two products that customers can use to set up and deepen information from a large amount of data, including: Gotham – the service originally developed for customers of governments and Foundry.

The submission to the IPO makes many people expect that Palantir’s activities will be more transparent in the context of too much controversy and skepticism.

History is intertwined

Founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel – a member of the “Paypal Mafia” – the name of a group of former employees of PayPal – payment service company IPO in 2002 and later acquired by eBay. It is worth mentioning that, the members of this PayPal Mafia group then most (but almost all) became the founders or invest in the most valuable technology companies in the world.

Peter Thiel.

He is also a longtime member of Facebook’s board of directors, who is said to have strongly supported Mr. Trump’s presidential election in 2016. Palantir’s stated mission is to “turn the West, especially the United States.” become the most powerful power in the world “. The company greets customers that it has the ability to manage and secure data on a huge scale.

Palantir provides governments and corporations with tools to help with everything from tracking the rapid spread of corona viruses and tracking terrorist activities. Recently, the company is said to have helped a lot in tracking Osama bin Laden.

However, there is not a lot of accurate data on how their services are used as well as what makes the company bad. Only the most obvious thing is that maintaining a relationship with the government is a key element of the company.

In the early years, Palantir had a hard time convincing investors and customers before raising money from a CIA investment arm. Since then, the company has started working with the US government and a few other Silicon Valley organizations.

In 2017, CNN said that Palantir helped the Los Angeles Police Department analyze the data to make it easier for the agency to track criminals, but it also shows how technology like Palantir’s provides surveillance measures. Unprecedented murder.

Even in May Karp admitted in an interview with HBO that Palantir has technologies “used in murder cases”.

Clearly, Palantir is still one of Silicon Valley’s most controversial companies today, but the truth is that they have one of the most famous co-founders.

Thiel is famous for being a trendman. This is the creator of The Thiel Fellowship program with a prize of $ 100,000 and 2 years of support for 20 successful candidates under the age of 20 to help them drop out and start a business. Thiel herself and the program’s staff think that schools are costing students money that exceeds what they can earn later. Therefore, students should start their business as soon as possible.

Thiel has invested at least US $ 40 million in Palantir. A source revealed that Palantir has signed US $ 1.5 billion in new contracts with the US government in 2019.

Unlike PayPal – a startup created with the ambition to create a currency “not subject to any government control”. Palantir was created to help strengthen the power of government agencies. However, Palantir may have at least one thing in common with PayPal: It will give Thiel lots of extra money.