A Big Data analytics company few people have even heard of is on track to close a massive $400 million funding round that could bring its total amount raised to well over $1 billion. In fact, at an estimated $9 billion, Palantir Technologies Inc. already commands more than twice the valuation of VC darling and Hadoop distributor Cloudera, Inc.

The brainchild of PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and a team of fellow entrepreneurs, Palantir is one of the oldest players on the block, having hit the scene in 2004 with a platform that harnesses artificial intelligence to help users quickly analyze different types of data from a variety of sources. Born out of the online payments provider’s efforts to detect organized fraud, the software soon became a hit in the intelligence community, where it would in time earn the designation of Killer App for its role in key operations.

The alphabet soup of law enforcement agencies that use Panatir 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, according to the Times. That’s more than 20 times as much as Hortonworks Inc., the first Hadoop distributor to hit the stock exchange – did.

But although it would clearly find no trouble catching the market’s attention, the company is in rush to take on the pressure of public trading The secretive nature of its clientèle and an apparent desire to prioritize long-term strategy over short-term returns are the primary considerations behind that approach, but what facilitates it is the ease with which Palantir has managed to draw private investors so far. That streak looks to be continuing, with a SEC filing uncovered by TechCrunch revealing that the firm has already secured the first $60 million of the $400 million it divulged to be seeking back in November.

The document doesn’t specify the source of the capital or what Palantir intends to spend it on, but based on the claim in NYT report that it wasn’t profitable as of May, the money will probably go primarily toward fueling operations. The paper also noted that most of the estimated billion dollars that the company raked in this year came from private sector customers, which provides a hint as to the areas where the funding will be invested, namely the development of its enterprise-oriented Gotham offering.