CEO of Palantir Alex Karp speaks to the press as he leaves the Elysee Palace in Paris, on May 23, 2018, after the “Tech for Good” summit.
Ludovic Marin | AFP | Getty Images
Data analytics company Palantir Technologies has released its prospectus to debut on public markets. The company aims to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol PLTR. Rather than sell shares through an initial public offering, the company intends to debut with a direct listing, the same unconventional route taken by Slack in 2019 and Spotify in 2018.
Given its long history and its size — last September Reuters said the company was targeting a valuation of $26 billion or more — Palantir had been in a position to go public for years, and investors have long waited to buy shares, as they did for Pinterest, Snap and Uber. Home-renting company Airbnb could be next.
Palantir lost $588 million, or $580 million on a pro-forma basis, in 2019, according to the filing. Revenue grew almost 25% from the year earlier while the loss stayed about the same. In the first half of 2020, it lost $165 million, or $175 million on a pro-forma basis.
Palantir, which is named after a magical orb in “The Lord of the Rings” that lets you see across vast distances, was co-founded in 2004 by Peter Thiel. Thiel became wealthy as a founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, and was a vocal supporter of President Trump’s 2016 election campaign — a rarity among tech luminaries.
Palantir has two classes of stock, Class A and Class B, and while each share of Class A stock receives the rights to one vote, each Class A share gets 10 votes. This structure is similar to Facebook. Thiel is the largest holder of Class B shares, owning about 30% of them.
Palantir plans to introduce Class F shares as well, and those will have a variable number of votes. The Class F shares are meant to give co-founders Thiel, Stephen Cohen and CEO Alex Karp just below 50% of total voting power for the stock.
With Palantir’s software, clients can clean up a wide variety of data and then display it in various styles to enable many people to explore and take action on it. Recent enhancements enable users to create text documents, analyze data in spreadsheets and view information on maps.
Last month, the company said it had confidentially filed draft paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. In April CNBC reported the company was hoping to exceed $1 billion in revenue this year.
Last week, the company disclosed it is moving its headquarters to Denver from Palo Alto, Calif. CNBC included Palantir seven times on its annual Disruptor 50 list, and investors have included Thiel’s Founders Fund, Fujitsu, RRE Ventures and In-Q-Tel, the U.S. intelligence community’s not-for-profit investment group.
Palantir follows a flurry of filings for initial public offerings and direct listings from technology companies. On Monday Amwell, Asana, JFrog, Snowflake, Sumo Logic and Unity Software all filed to go public.
This story is developing.
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