It may not be the most typical tech unicorn, but Palantir Technologies Inc. is now one of the most valuable thanks to a newly closed $450 million funding round that reportedly puts its net worth at $20 billion. That marks a tremendous milestone not only for the secretive outfit and its investors but the analytics movement as whole.

The 11-year-old Palantir was among the first to capitalize on the interest around exploiting the vast amounts of new information pouring into the corporate network with its namesake platform, which provides a natural language interface for extracting insights. What started as a fairly limited project for the intelligence community has since evolved into a sort of golden standard for data mining.

In addition to the CIA, Palantir’s technology is now used at the FBI, the Defense Department and Homeland Security along with a long list of commercial organizations in key sectors such as financial services and healthcare. What all of its customers have in common are large troves of sensitive and usually highly varied records that have to be made quickly accessible for decision-makers that lack the skills to analyze that information on their own.

It’s a value proposition with a potentially very broad appeal that could be easily extended to accommodate everyday enterprises with enough effort, which may be one of the goals that the new $450 million in funding will go towards financing. That figure comes short of the $500 million Palantir was rumored to be raising last month but is still nine times higher than what it retrieved in its previous round, which suggests vastly different plans for the capital.

What’s certain, however, is that those plans don’t involve a public offering. Palantir co-founder and chief exec Alex Karp stated in 2013 that the secretive nature of his company would make operations “very difficult” under Wall Street’s constant scrutiny and that hasn’t changed since. The round provides the outfit with fuel to continue on the current trajectory for the foreseeable future.

True to its hush-hush reputation, Palantir didn’t disclose where the capital came from in its Thursday filing. The only detail available about the round besides the sum that exchanged hands is that Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC – one of its top customers – and S F Sentry Securities Inc.  served as the brokers. The investment brings its total raised to a whopping $1.6 billion.

Photo via Anders Sandberg