The secretive data-mining company will go public without ever turning a profit.
Palantir Technologies, a data-mining company with deep ties to U. S. intelligence and military agencies, has filed to go public. And like many other tech companies that have entered public markets in the past few years, the company will be listing its stock without ever making a profit. Palantir plans to go public through a direct listing, an approach that has been used by a handful of other businesses,. In a direct listing, existing shareholders sell their stock directly to new shareholders, rather than through an investment bank. In filings with the Security and Exchange Commission Tuesday, Palantir presented a first public look at its financials, shedding a good deal of its trademark secrecy about its business for the first time. What the filings show are $580 million in losses last year, and the company’s heavy reliance on government contracts. Those contracts have raised concerns among activists and students on college campuses, with Hispanic advocacy group Mijente urging investors not to buy shares, citing the company’s work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. “We’re calling on investors everywhere not to invest when the IPO happens,” Jacinta Gonzalez, a senior campaign director at Mijente, said in a statement. “An investment in Palantir only serves to profit off the continued surveillance & exploitation of communities by ICE.” In a letter included in the filing, Palantir CEO Alex Karp acknowledged the company’s sometimes controversial work. “Software projects with our nation’s defense and intelligence agencies, whose missions are to keep us safe, have become controversial, while companies built on advertising dollars are commonplace,” Karp wrote.
