What was known about Palantir so far is that the company has strong software for data analysis, which it makes available to the military, police and intelligence services. With the IPO, business figures are also known for the first time.
The data analysis company Palantir, which works for the CIA and other secret services, wants to go public via direct placement. Experts trust the company, which was co-founded in 2003 by the German-born financial investor and Donald Trump supporter Peter Thiel, to have one of the largest IPOs in the Corona crisis.
With the rarely chosen direct placement, Palantir is following in the footsteps of the music streaming provider Spotify, which chose this route in 2018. In contrast to the conventional IPO, no new shares are issued, but the papers that existing shareholders sell are traded.
Palantir – the name comes from a term from the book series "Lord of the Rings" – specializes in analyzing large amounts of data. The company is at war with Silicon Valley. It recently announced that it would move its headquarters to Denver. Thiel, who was born in Frankfurt am Main and is one of the co-founders of the online payment service PayPal and the first investors in Facebook, founded the company together with Alexander Karp and is now chairman, while Karp heads the company.
Palantir specializes in data analysis and works a lot with security agencies and intelligence services, especially in the USA. This is one of the reasons why the company has always kept a low profile when it comes to its business and its customers. With the IPO, at least the business figures are now disclosed.
Big losses
The prospectus shows that Palantir closed the past year in the red of around 590 million US dollars – in 2018 it was a loss of almost 600 million dollars. In 2019, sales rose by a quarter to just under $ 743 million.
In the first half of this year, Palantir had 125 customers, "including some of the largest and most important institutions in the world". The company was founded in 2003 – and the first software platform called "Gotham" was specially developed for analysts in the military and secret services to evaluate large amounts of data. "They looked for needles not in one, but in thousands of haystacks," describes Palantir in the prospectus.
The second software, "Foundry", is also used for data analysis in companies. Airbus uses it as its "core data platform". The partnership with the aircraft manufacturer has developed a platform for the entire industry that brings together data from more than 100 airlines and 9,000 aircraft. Other corporate customers include the Darmstadt-based Merck Group, the car manufacturer Fiat Chrysler, the oil company BP and the Credit Suisse bank. Last year, 47 percent of revenue came from government customers.
In the first half of 2020, Palantir sales rose 49 percent year over year to approximately $ 481 million. The three largest customers brought in 29 percent of the total revenue. The bottom line was a loss of nearly $ 165 million. If you factor out the effect of employee compensation with shares, according to Palantir there would have been black numbers of a good 17 million dollars.
According to the prospectus, Thiel holds 29.8 percent of Palantir – and his startup financier Founders Fund also holds 12.7 percent. Karp controls 9.3 percent.
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