Palantir Technologies Poised to be the Biggest Tech IPO this Year
A closer look at the secretive data-mining company co-founded by Peter Thiel.
I forgive you if you aren’t familiar with Palantir Technologies. The company has remained secretive since it’s founding in 2003 by some of the members of the “PayPal Mafia.” Perhaps the most notable of which is co-founder Peter Thiel. If you have even the slightest knowledge of Silicon Valley, I’m sure you are familiar with Thiel. In addition to co-founding PayPal, Thiel was also the first outside investor in Facebook. According to Sissi Cao, “Silicon Valley’s billionaire futurist Peter Thiel wrote the first check to Facebook back in 2004 when the company was just a three-person dorm room start-up launched by Mark Zuckerberg.” This investment made Thiel a billionaire.
Thiel went on to become a founding partner of the Founders Fund, a venture capital firm that Ken Boyd writes, “has invested in many different sectors, including artificial intelligence, advanced computing, and the energy sector. The company has also invested in several highly successful ventures, including SpaceX” as well as Airbnb.
Thiel’s stake in the privately held firm Palantir Technologies is around 12%, and the companies current valuation ranges from $26 billion to $30 billion…
