Palantir’s Latest Round Valuing It At $9B Swells To $107.8M In New Funding

Palantir, the big data company that started off with clients like the FBI and CIA before building up a large private-sector roster of customers, just added more funding to its coffers.

Last week, the company filed that it was raising $57 million with the SEC. Now that round is coming in at $107.5 million, according to a new amended filing today.

Sources close to the company told us that the round valued the company at $9 billion. This is a boost to an earlier $196.5 million round in the fall that valued the company at $6 billion.

Strong investor appetite convinced the company to bring in more capital at a 50 percent bump to their overall valuation.

Palantir, which expects to see more than $1 billion in contracts next year, sells a big data platform to private-sector and government clients. It helps them make sense from disparate silos of data and point out trends that they would otherwise not see.

For example, rescue workers operating in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy used Palantir to manage requests for water, medical supplies, and home repairs. Financial clients tend to use it to look for cybersecurity or fraud threats.

While the company was originally founded back in 2004 to take anti-fraud technologies and ideas developed at PayPal and use them to fight terrorism with government agencies, the company is now working with lots of private sector clients.

Today, government contracts make up less than 40 percent of the company’s revenues, a source familiar with the company tells me.

The company was the brainchild of Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel, who recruited current CEO Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale (who went on to found Asia and Silicon Valley-focused investment firm Formation 8), Stephen Cohen and chief technology officer Nathan Gettings to put together an initial product.