A Security and Exchange Commission filing dated last Friday
revealed that Silicon Valley spy firm Palantir pulled in
$196,500,204 from investors over what looks like a span of only a
few weeks.
Forbes magazine profiled Palantir in an August 2013 cover story
in which it was revealed that the company collected around $500
million through fundraising, according to CEO Alex Karp. Now less
than a month later, the SEC filing dated Sept. 27 shows that an
additional wave of investigating has increased the amount raised
to almost three-quarters of a billion dollars.
The San Francisco Business Times reported that the nearly $200
million comes from 15 unnamed investors. According to the SEC
filing, Morgan Stanley & Co. will collect an estimated $4
million from brokering those deals. Forbes estimates that
Palantir is now worth anywhere from $5 to $8 billion.
Given the government’s well-documented ties to Palantir and the
company’s arsenal of powerful spy products, the latest news
suggests that the surveillance industry will stay afloat even
amid the scandal surrounding leaked National Security Agency documents and the
related disclosures detailing the US intelligence community’s
far-reaching capabilities.
Palantir has managed to keep a relatively low-profile since its
founding nearly a decade ago, but last month’s Forbes cover story
by Andy Greenberg and Ryan Mac helped hone in slightly on the
shadowy company. The journalists linked Palantir to the NSA, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation and the CIA’s venture fund,
In-Q-Tel, along with what the writers called
“an alphabet soup of other US
counterterrorism and military agencies” who have become
clients over the years.
In fact, In-Q-Tel was one of the first groups to help get
Palantir off the ground thanks to early investing, and Bloomberg
reported recently that other clients of the Silicon
Valley-company with a DC-area office and others around the globe
include the New York and Los Angeles Police Departments. Aside
from the CIA subdivision, other early investors in Palantir
include Peter Thiel, the former PayPal CEO who dumped half a
million dollars into Facebook the same year that the surveillance
company came into being.
Other customers include Bank of America and Rupert Murdoch’s News
Corp., Forbes reported, and those private-sector deals now make
up around 60 percent of the company’s revenue.
Perhaps the project that caused the most commotion about the
company was one that never managed to get off the ground,
however. In 2011, hacktivists with the Anonymous collective
linked Palantir to “Team Themis,” a partnership that also
involved contractors HBGary and Berico that was created to help
discredit WikiLeaks and its supporters, including writer Glenn
Greenwald. It was foiled by Anonymous before ever set in motion,
and Palantir CEO Alex Karp eventually offered an apology and
attempted to distance his company from the controversy.
But even as concerns continue to grow over who has the ability to
collect and information – whether it be law enforcement agencies,
offices within the intelligence community or just well-funded
corporations determined to make big bucks off big data – Palantir
is apparently only on the up. Previously, Karp told Forbes that
his company could sign $1 billion in contacts during the next
calendar year if everything adds up in his favor.
“Palantir sells a powerful line of data-mining and analysis
software that maps out human social networks for
counter-intelligence purposes, and is in huge demand throughout
government and in the financial and banking industries,” Tim
Shorrock, a writer who primarily investigates government
contractors, wrote on his website earlier this year. “The NSA,
which intercepts and analyzes global communications traffic, is a
highly likely client as well,” added Shorrock, who included
an excerpt from a 2009 Wall Street Journal article in which
Palantir was lauded as “the darling of the intelligence and
law enforcement communities.”
Since then, the LAPD and NYPD have both relied on Palantir’s
technology to assess data collected from the license plate scanners that are quacking becoming
commonplace on cop cruisers across the country. According to
Forbes, Palantir makes it possible for NYPD officers to search a
database of around 500 million plates in about five seconds. In
recent weeks, of course, unauthorized national security
disclosures attributed to former contractor Edward Snowden have
revealed that the US intelligence community has been collecting
and analyzing information about American citizens’ social networking and Internet behaviors using software undoubtedly not
dissimilar to products made by Palantir.
Copyright: RT