Big Data analytics firm Palantir Technologies, Inc. has raised a staggering $880 million on a $20 billion valuation in a round that included Morgan Stanley and San Francisco Sentry, according to a regulatory filing the company made Wednesday.

The news comes following a report that the company was raising the round in June, followed by several reports claiming that it had raised the more humble (by comparison) sums of $450 million in July, with a further $129 million on top earlier this month.

Founded in 2004, Palantir is often described as a “mystery” company as it has a history of being secretive about what it does, which isn’t completely surprising given its early investors include the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The company is said to use artificial intelligence to help users quickly analyze different types of data from a variety of sources, making it huge hit in the intelligence community, where according to SiliconANGLE’s Maria Deutscher, it would in time earn the designation of Killer App for its role in key operations, and by key operations the implied meaning is serious level spying.

Deutscher describes the company’s operations as follows:

The alphabet soup of law enforcement agencies that use Palantir to hunt down national security threats has in recent years reportedly been joined by commercial companies, predominantly top banks that have adapted the platform to sniffing out suspicious transactions. Between its government and private sector customers, Palantir Technologies is believed to have generated $1 billion in revenue this year…That’s more than 20 times as much as Hortonworks, Inc. the first Hadoop distributor to hit the stock exchange – did.

Mystery unicorn

As Reuters rightly points out, Palantir has bucked the trend we’ve seen in the second half of this year where investors have become somewhat skeptical about making large late-stage investments into already highly valuable companies.

The company does have an advantage, though, one shared by recently listed software-as-a-service firm Atlassian PLC: it’s actually profitable, a rarity among the growing breed of unicorns (startups with a valuation in excess of $1 billion).

It could be said that being on the teat of Government largesse pays, and with clients including the U.S. Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Securities and Exchange Commission, it pays really well.

Including the new round Palantir has raised $1.81 billion to date from investors including Ulu Ventures, Jeremy Stoppelman, Founders Fund, Glynn Capital Management, Keith Rabois, Benjamin Ling and Reed Elsevier Ventures.

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