Nuked Data-Mining firm Palantir has filed its prospectus to take the company public. Its S-1 confirms leaked information that shows the company has not turned a profit since its founding in 2003.
Palantir plans to debut with a direct listing rather than selling shares in an initial public offering. It’s among a handful of tech companies that have taken this route to go public in recent years.
The company lost $ 580 million in 2019, and in the first half of 2020 it has lost $ 175 million. The company’s software’is used by customers across 36 industries and in more than 150 countries’.
The company does n’t’enter into business with customers or governments whose positions or actions we consider inconsistent with our mission’.
The introduction note from CEO Alex Karp is interesting, laying out the company’s philosophy. Here are the first few paragraphs.
Our welfare and security depend on effective software. We need to be able to address the issue of software, he says. He says we should be aware of the issue.
In times of stability, the right software helps our most critical institutions serve their markets and the public. Effective software can be essential to an organization’s survival.
Our software platforms are used by the United States and its allies around the world. Many of the world’s most vital institutions rely on the software platforms that we have built.
The challenges that we face expose, expose the systemic weaknesses of the institutions on which we depend on. Our industrial infrastructure and manufacturing supply chains were conceived of and constructed in a different century.
The enterprise software industry’s focus on custom software tools and applications is misplaced. The problems and needs of an organization often change before the software can even be deployed.
Palantir was founded by Peter Thiel, who was a close supporter of President Trump in the 2016 election. In 2018, Palantir was found to be secretly testing its predictive policing software in New Orleans.
Palantir is building a tool for the Department of health and Human Services to track the spread of the coronavirus. More recently, Palantir was found to be working on a tool to monitor the spread.
