Palantir Technologies, a big data startup co-founded by Peter Thiel, has completed a massive $450 million funding round that values the company at $20 billion.
The information was revealed in a filing to the Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC) in the US and continues the rapid rise of the company, increasing its value by a further $5 billion since its last round of fundraising in late 2014.
Palantir, which provides software for analysing big data, has won large contracts with US government agencies and completed a deal with the SEC in February 2014 worth more than $13 million to provide its software to help the US regulator identify fraudulent transactions and market manipulation.
Palantir's software is also used by a number of investment banks including Citi as well as both Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg and a number of quantitative trading hedge funds.
Although still referred to as a startup, Palantir was founded in 2004 by, among others, Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, using a concept that grew out of the software used by the online payment provider to detect fraudulent transactions.