Even among the unicorns of Silicon Valley, Palantir Technologies Inc. stands out. The CIA-backed analytics juggernaut has bumped its total external funding past the $1.8 billion mark after securing an additional $129 million through a fresh capital infusion that was revealed in an SEC filing this week. The investment marks the latest installation of a financing round that started five months ago and now stands at nearly $680 million, a testament to the company’s unique position in the data processing ecosystem.

Palantir entered the race in 2004, long before many of its current competitors even existed, with a relatively humble  $2 million in seed funding from the CIA’s venture capital arm and another $30 courtesy of billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel. The company took advantage of its head start to land lucrative analytics contracts with several key members of the intelligence community and expanded into the rest of the national security sector from there, including the U.S. military and domestic law enforcement agencies like the FBI. It has spent the last few years extending that exclusive customer base to companies in regulated industries with similar data requirements.

One of Palantir’s most notable private sector clients is Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC, which uses a repurposed version of its criminal-busting software to find fraudulent financial activity and handled the first $500 million leg of its current financing round. The identities of the investors that provided the funding, however, were not disclosed by the analytics giant, which has developed something of a habit for secrecy due to the often sensitive nature of its work. With nearly two billion dollars in funding received to date so far, the company should be able to put off the disclosure obligations that come with raising funds through the stock exchange for the foreseeable future.

But co-founder and chief executive Alexander Karp admitted an interview with Forbes last year that Palantir is considering going public eventually. After all, its investors will need realize a return on all the capital they’ve put in somehow, and the stock market has proven a reliable way of accomplishing that for technology startups. The only question is exactly when the analytics powerhouse will finally enter the next stage of its evolution.

Image via Geralt