Palantir Technologies, a provider of powerful data analysis tools for government and business, has raised $880 million in its latest round of financing, according to people familiar with the transaction.
With the new funding, Palantir, one of the largest privately held technology firms in Silicon Valley, is valued at about $20 billion, up from $15 billion. It brings the total amount of money raised by the company, based in Palo Alto, Calif., to about $2 billion, these people said. They requested anonymity since they were not authorized to speak for Palantir on the matter.
Alex Karp, Palantir’s chief executive and co-founder, has in the past expressed reluctance to take the company public. The money will most likely be used for hiring and developing new businesses. Palantir has about 2,000 employees worldwide and has become downtown Palo Alto’s largest private-sector tenant.
The latest round, the company’s 11th, began last summer. People familiar with the process said Mr. Karp planned to close it earlier, but received significant additional funds, about $350 million, over the past several weeks.
The new investments come from a combination of previous Palantir investors and new, large institutions, these people added, declining to name the investors. Previous investors, some of whom also participated in this round, reportedly include Bridgewater Associates, Tiger Global Management and Morgan Stanley.
Palantir is a low-profile company that started out with contract work for numerous defense and intelligence agencies in the United States government, and has since developed extensive private-sector businesses. It has also had relationships with the police, intelligence and defense arms of a few foreign governments.
Besides intelligence, areas in which Palantir works include cybersecurity, retailing, entertainment, energy and insurance. More than half of the company’s revenue, well over $1 billion annually, comes from the private sector.
Palantir specializes in so-called intelligence augmentation, or I.A., which is a way to help experts find meaningful patterns among large amounts of data. In the case of intelligence, for example, this might mean using bank records and cellphone calls to build a profile of a terrorist cell.
Peter Thiel, another of Palantir’s founders as well as an investor in the company, was also an early investor in Facebook. He has described Facebook as a way to expose networks of people who want to be seen, and Palantir as a way to show networks of people who do not want to be seen.
The same techniques, it turns out, can also help figure out, say, where to put gum at checkout counters, or how to sell masses of foreclosed houses.