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The New York Stock Exchange
Photo: ANDREW KELLY / REUTERS
The data analytics firm Palantir has successfully gone public in New York.
The cost price was $ 10, well above the reference price of $ 7.25.
Overall, the company was valued at around $ 17 billion in early U.S. trading on Wednesday.
The US company, which was co-founded in 2004 by Peter Thiel - known as PayPal founder, Facebook investor and former advisor to Donald Trump - specializes in the analysis of data from various sources and works a lot with police authorities and secret services.
Early investors include In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital firm, and Thiel himself owns 15 percent of the shares.
When it went public, Palantir opted for a direct placement.
The papers are listed without supervision by investment banks and a prior pricing process.
Other larger companies such as the music service Spotify or the office chat app Slack have already been successful with this cheaper variant.
Palantir lost around $ 590 million in 2019
Palantir expects to make sales between 1.05 billion and 1.06 billion dollars (894 to 903 million euros) in the current year, which would correspond to a growth of over 40 percent compared to the previous year.
Customers include the Pentagon, the US border authority Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and in Germany the Hessian police.
Palantir is also becoming increasingly active in the health sector, a contract with the Department of Health and Human Services for the processing of Covid-19 data brought in just under $ 25 million, and one with the British National Health Service (NHS) about one million pounds.
Data protectionists have long feared that the company is offering a monitoring platform that is difficult to control and is not transparent.
Concrete cases of prohibited use of the technology have not yet become known.
However, the company is in the red, with a loss of around $ 590 million in fiscal year 2019, for the second time in a row.
Insiders describe Palantir technology as too labor-intensive
According to a report in "New York Magazine", this is also due to the fact that the Palantir software is considered to be easy to use, but before that it requires considerable and personnel-intensive adaptation for each customer.
"Even some of the early admirers," the article reads, "warn that the software may not do justice to the fanfare that is being made about it."
Customers such as the NSA and some US police authorities have now dropped out again, and a Palantir product for financial companies was a failure.
A key problem is that the various data sources with which Palantir's software work and from which it can work out connections that are difficult to recognize often have to be prepared manually.
The magazine quotes a former security officer who doubts that Palantir's technology lives up to the company's high ratings.
Palantir is more famous for being famous - like the Kardashian reality TV family.
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pbe / dpa
