Palantir Technologies Raises $70 Million At $2.5 Billion Valuation

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... ? Learn More

Palantir Technologies has raised $70 million in Series F funding, we’ve confirmed with the company. This brings Palantir’s total funding to nearly $200 million. While the company declined to reveal the valuation in the round, we’ve learned from sources that it is around $2.5 billion. Two unnamed New York-based hedge funds anchored the round, and multiple early investors and university endowments participated in the round.

Founded in 2004 by former PayPal employees and Stanford computer scientists, Palantir offers a high-powered data analysis platform. Palantir Government and Palantir Finance both integrate, visualize, and analyze information in these sectors. The company analyzes a variety of data including structured, unstructured, relational, temporal, and geospatial content. The virtue of Palantir is that it accepts huge databases and allows users to slice and dice this information.

Palantir says its platform works at any scale while also promising security and civil liberties protections. Clearly this makes it ideal for governments and financial institutions, who need to analyze large amounts of classified, secure data.

While the company’s technologies has been popular amongst government agencies (including the FBI), Palantir has revealed that 60 percent of its business actually comes from the commercial sector. In fact, the company closed a number of recent deals in the commercial space, including a deal with financial giant JP Morgan Chase.

Palantir told us last year that revenues have at least doubled every year for the last three years. And in the company’s last round last year (in which it raised $90 million), its valuation was pegged at $735 million; so clearly the company has taken a big jump in value in the past year.

Early investors include former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel (who is the Chairman of Palantir’s board as well), and the CIA’s venture arm In-Q-Tel.

We had originally reported on an SEC filing revealing some of this most recent round in May, and AllThingsD reported a few weeks ago of another SEC filing that showed additional fundraising. As the company confirmed to us today, this round has closed and Palantir now has another $75 million in its coffers.

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Greylock, IVP And Benchmark Capital Are Part Of Dropbox’s $4 Billion Valuation Round

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... ? Learn More

A month ago, we revealed that Index Ventures will lead Dropbox’s new, massive funding round, which values the company at $4 billion. Now TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington has revealed in a Tweet that venture firms Greylock and Benchmark Capital are also part of the round. We’ve also heard from sources that IVP is part of the round as well. We’re still unclear how large the round will be.

As Michael reported in August, the company was reportedly valued at one point at $5 billion or more. But the uncertainty in the financial markets and Dropbox’s desire to get specific investors on board resulted in a lower valuation.

We’ve also heard there’s a relatively large investor syndicate, so perhaps more firms will be participating in the round. Dropbox previously raised $7.2 million from Y Combinator, Hadi Partovi, Ali Partovi, Pejman Nozad, Accel Partners, and Sequoia.

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Index Leads $4 billion Valuation Round In Dropbox

J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news. Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995), and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich... ? Learn More

Dropbox is finally moving to close that massive valuation venture round we’ve been talking about all summer. According to multiple sources, Index Ventures will lead the round, which values Dropbox at around $4 billion.

At some point I hope that the entire story comes out about this round. Nearly everyone in Silicon Valley has taken a look. There was early interest at valuations of $8 billion or more, although one source says that it may have been firms who threw out huge numbers just to get a look at the company’s financials. As of a couple of weeks ago I had “firm” information that the round would close at $5 billion or more.

As far as I can tell, that information was accurate at the time. But the valuation ended up lower. Why?

I’m hearing two reasons. The first is the U.S. government debt uncertainty and general financial market uncertainty, which has spooked VCs. The other reason, say sources, is that Dropbox really wanted the involvement of certain investors, and they needed to drop the price to get them on board.

There’s a relatively large investor syndicate, say our sources, with involvement from a variety of firms beyond Index.

We’ve also spent a lot of time trying to track down Dropbox’s revenue numbers, a closely guarded secret at the company. Speculation was that they’d hit $100 million in revenue this year. Our best guess based on discussions with sources is that revenue will be more like $30 million in 2011. But this is still largely a guess.

More as this develops. Prior to this round, Dropbox had raised just $7.2 million.

Dropbox was founded in 2007 by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi. Frustrated by working from multiple computers, Drew was inspired to create a service that would let people bring...

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Financial-organization:
INDEX VENTURES

Index Ventures is a leading venture capital firm specializing in investments in information technology and life sciences companies. The firm invests in seed, early and growth stage start-ups across...

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