Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, December 10

• Big data company Palantir raises $679.8 million: Palantir Technologies, the data firm best known for helping the U.S. government track down al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, has raised $679.8 million, according to a filing on Wednesday. The cash injection, which further expands the $500 million the company originally said it was raising in July, shows that despite shifting market conditions for privately held companies investors still hold confidence in the strongest of them, particularly those geared toward enterprises. Palantir is currently valued at $20 billion, making it the richest venture-backed company in the United States after ride service Uber and accommodation service Airbnb. It works closely with the U.S. government, whose steady business provides part of the reason investors like the Palo Alto, California-based company.

• Atlassian, the Profitable Aussie Unicorn Going Public Tomorrow: Atlassian is Australian management and workplace software maker. It’s set to begin trading on the Nasdaq tomorrow under the ticker symbol TEAM. Atlassian is looking to raise $440 million at a $4.2 billion valuation, up from the $370 million at under $4 billion it was shopping around last week. The bootstrapped Sydney, Australia-based startup has never taken any VC funding, and says it has been profitable for the last 10 years. The service it offers that people are most likely to have heard of is HipChat, an office chat and workflow management service that’s squaring off against Silicon Valley-adored Slack. CNBC has a detailed rundown on what Atlassian’s IPO prospectus says about its business. Atlassian is an outlier to all this. A decade of profitability buys a lot of credibility with investors, and having never taken venture dollars, it doesn’t have to worry about activating a ratchet if something goes wrong tomorrow.

• Who won, who lost in Square's IPO? Square’s recent $2.9 billion IPO is either a huge win for its investors or a sign of very bad days to come, depending on whether you believe the “high-five” tweets from prominent venture capitalists (VCs) or the slew of hand-wringing articles — from sources like NPR, The Verge and the Wall Street Journal — essentially saying it marks the end of free-flowing startup capital.The wildly contradictory responses to Square’s Nov. 19 debut on the New York Stock Exchange, when the payments-processing company’s stock was priced below its previous funding round in the private markets, has left a lot of people in the startup community (and beyond) wondering what’s going on. My take is that the IPO is further evidence that the new rules of the hunt for “unicorns” — startups valued at more than one billion dollars — are creating a small class of “haves” and a much larger class of “have-nots.” The lucky ones are the earliest-stage investors that find tomorrow’s unicorns. The less lucky are often the late-stage investors — generally the providers of the bulk of the capital — and the talent that signs on as these companies grow to fighting strength and scale. I think this is likely to cause a rebalancing of late-stage valuations and an increase in transparency in private markets. 

• AT&T is out-building Google Fiber: Consider this: The number of cities where Google Fiber has actually been switched on can be counted on your fingers, whereas AT&T GigaPower is already up and running in some 20 metropolitan areas. Where many of Google's prospective expansions are still in the discussion phase, AT&T has made concrete — though critics might say "limited" — investments in many more markets. In short, AT&T is out-building Google Fiber. That's a sign of a broader shift in the industry. What we're seeing now is Google's early lead in the fiber race being eaten away by AT&T's traditional advantage in building networks. Though Google deserves much of the credit for jump-starting the competition in the first place, not to mention blazing a trail for AT&T in important ways, AT&T is on pace to beat Google to many cities in America. And this is why. AT&T is benefiting tremendously from a chain reaction that Google initially began. By now, it's a familiar story: Google went around to cities and basically got them to compete for Google Fiber, handing out a standardized checklist to municipalities laying out all the things they could do to make themselves more attractive to the search giant. In so doing, Google drew attention to many local regulatory processes that otherwise slow down investments in infrastructure. Now, mayors everywhere are scrambling over each other to attract Google. And that has had knock-on benefits for AT&T. In plain English, when Google gets a good deal, so can AT&T. But getting the rights to dig up streets or string fiber along telephone poles is only part of the equation. Then there's the matter of actually doing it. And it can take a long time — in Google's case, as many as 18 months in Kansas City, according to Hunter Newby, chief executive of the company Allied Fiber. And in Austin, Texas, AT&T says it beat Google to market by roughly two years, even though the two companies announced their projects within days of each other. Google declined to comment. Part of what's going on is that AT&T is leaning on decades of expertise in building networks. Many analysts say that Google aims to invest just enough into fiber to encourage more traditional providers to build out their own networks. Then, when consumers subscribe to the better service and take heavier advantage of Google services, Google's core business benefits. In that respect, Google isn't so much going toe-to-toe with AT&T as nudging it to expand.

• Investors hover as e-tailers boost demand for Indian warehouses: E-commerce in India is booming: the market is expected to grow to $220 billion in terms of value of goods sold by 2025, up from an expected $11 billion this year, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch. With more Indian consumers shopping online, the country's $110 billion logistics and warehousing sector is stretched. e-tailers need to move goods around swiftly with minimal damage. They demand fire sprinkler systems, climate control, levelled loading bays and paved roads to warehouses. Simply adding this in can lift rents by up to 20 percent, according to real estate firm JLL. Existing spaces, known as "godowns" - low-rise sheds with poor ventilation and only a shutter to ward off heat and dust - are too old and cramped for firms like retail giant Amazon.com and Indian rival Flipkart. Amazon India has leased 20 fulfilment centres - warehouses where it stores goods and packs and sorts orders - in the last 18 months from multiple landlords. Still, it needs bigger, modern spaces closer to customers; the average size it leases today is 200,000 square feet. To satisfy that, supply of modern warehouses in India is set to more than double by 2020 to 200 million square feet, JLL estimates, fuelled by online retailers. They took up over 20 percent of the space added in the first half of 2015. Overseas firms including Dutch pension fund manager APG and U.S. buyout group Warburg Pincus are looking to invest in India's warehouses, hoping to cash in on demand for modern and efficient storage space from booming online retailers. "We have got enough people running around with bags of money, and not that many assets," said Ben Salmon, head of Singapore-based Assetz Property Group that has raised $50 million from Asian investors to buy warehouses in India.