Congrats on the acquisition but I'm still a little confused/surprised by this. The two (seemingly)disparate markets that Poptip and Palantir operate in have little cross-over. Is there a longer-term vision that I'm not seeing?
Congratulations. I wish I'd visited Palantir in NYC; I've spent some time in Palo Alto and know people in DC (and downrange), but never met any of their NYC people. It's pretty amazing how I'd had the company pigeonholed as "government contractor" (which is a huge business in its own right), but the commercial stuff seems to be growing even faster.
Having worked at a startup that failed to find a customer base in the consumer world for the NLP software that analyzed social media, I'm not surprised the only application turns out to be defense industry.<p>There doesn't seem to be many uses for that type of NLP other than surveillance and brand monitoring.
Let's talk business here, because I find the numbers behind Palantir both astonishing and fascinating.<p>Their burn rate looks to be around $275m/yr based on employee head count and they've received ~$900m in funding:<p><pre><code> - Seed - In-Q-Tel (~$2m)
- Debt Financing - $8.3m
- Series C - $35m
- Series D - $90m
- Secondary Market (unk amount, 137 investors)
- Series E - $50m
- Series F - $70m
- Series G - $56m
- Secondary Market (unk amount, 137 investors)
- Private Equity - $196.5m (Founders Fund)
- Private Equity - $390.4m (Feb 2014)
</code></pre>
Their last round was almost $400m in Feb of 2014. That's almost as big as all other rounds combined. Their "valuation" (for whatever that's worth) based on the last investment round is ~$9billion.<p>As of August 2013 they were not yet profitable but estimates for 2013 revenue were around $450m and <$300m in 2012.<p>Other revenue estimates (they're all over the place honestly it seems like every time they give an interview it's a different number)<p><pre><code> - 2010 - $50m - >$80m
- 2011 - $250m
- 2012 - <$300m
- 2013 - $450m
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They've publicly announced several time they have no interest in being acquired or go public. Yet one of their investors claims on Quora that they'll probably go public in 2015 or 2016.<p>Some questions for people who understand this mess better than I.<p>- What's their exit strategy honestly look like? At $9b valuation, I can't imagine too many companies who might be interested in buying them.<p>- All the private equity investment tells me they're burning money faster than they can find investors, keeping it private keeps their financials private, which smells like trouble to me if they were to go public. Am I right in this analysis or wrong?<p>- Does dilution basically make everybody who has shares or options through <i>11</i> (eleven!) rounds of investment basically holding onto worthless paper? Even if they go public? A review of glassdoor on the company says that people are underpaid and salary capped, they must be holding on for a big payday somewhere. Are they going to end up disappointed?<p>Anything else that might be interesting to discuss? Their fundraising seems really crazy and unusual from anything I've seen before.<p>Here's a longform history [1] of the company which shows they spend over $1m/yr on lobbying (IBM spent $6m, Raytheon $7.5m, Lockheed Martin, $14.5m, Boeing, $15m). To put that in percentage terms, if Palantir is worth $9b<p><pre><code> Palantir spends .012% of their value on lobbying
IBM spends .003%
Raytheon .026%
Lockheed Martin .027%
Boeing .017%
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This article also lists 16 distinct financing events, bringing dilution of early investor shares even more to mind.<p>1 - <a href="http://www.mausstrategicconsulting.com/topical-analysis-blog/a-pretty-complete-history-of-palantir" rel="nofollow">http://www.mausstrategicconsulting.com/topical-analysis-blog...</a>
Palantir is pretty mysterious to me. Frankly, I don't see the demand for their software being high enough to warrant their size and number of employees.<p>I guess I'll just have to wait and see what happens.