Palantir, the hyper-secretive data-mining company founded by Trump homie Peter Thiel and C.E.O. Alex Karp, is almost as mysterious as the clients it works for. Started in 2003 and with seed money from the C.I.A., Palantir has developed a suite of surveillance technologies that have reportedly been used by the military to hunt down Osama bin Laden, to avoid roadside bombs, and by police departments to predict crimes before they happen. On the civilian side, Palantir has a team of some 2,000 engineers, half of whom are deployed to client sites to embed with Fortune 500 companies and Wall Street firms with a singular goal: to run every kilobyte of available data through an algorithm that makes traditional consultancies look like dinosaurs. If that all sounds somewhat sinister, Thiel doesn’t seem concerned. A longtime Tolkien fan, Thiel named Palantir after the all-seeing crystal ball that the evil wizard Saruman uses to spy on his enemies. In 2014, living up to its name, Palantir began designing a new intelligence platform for ICE.

The financials behind Palantir, if not the code powering its digital panopticon, may not stay private for long. According to The Wall Street Journal, the company is talking to Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley about a potential public offering by 2020 that could value Palantir at $36 billion to $41 billion. In the process of going public, the company will have to issue a prospectus documenting its revenue and other internal metrics for potential shareholders, which could shed some light on that eye-popping valuation. Palantir’s last funding round—several hundred million dollars, according to the Journal—valued the company at $20 billion in 2015. Whether the company has enough cash flow now to justify doubling that valuation remains to be seen. At $41 billion, Thiel’s ownership stake in the company—believed to be around 10 percent—could be worth as much as $4 billion alone, potentially more than doubling his current estimated net worth of $2.5 billion.

Palantir isn’t the only tech company targeting a monster I.P.O. next year. Uber is also planning to go public at what Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have proposed could be a $120 billion valuation, almost double its current value on the private market. (Lyft is eyeing a more modest $15 billion valuation.) Workplace-messaging start-up Slack and delivery company Postmates—with respective private-market valuations of $7.1 billion and $1.2 billion—are also said to be pursuing their own I.P.O.s; Slack could go public as soon as the first quarter of 2019, and Postmates, which was recently interviewing banks, will likely I.P.O. sometime in the first half of the year.

Not everyone is in a rush to go public. Stripe, a payments-processing start-up, recently doubled in value to $20 billion with no plans to I.P.O. Other tech companies, such as WeWork, have found a deep-pocketed patron in SoftBank, whose $92 billion Vision Fund has taken equity stakes in dozens of companies across the world, making public financing unnecessary. Palantir, however, appears to have its reasons for going public now. As the Journal notes, Karp has been teasing an I.P.O. for ages, and investors were likely getting antsy to cash out. The political moment may also be amenable to a firm with Palantir’s particular set of skills. Donald Trump has jacked up the military budget and Thiel, an ardent Trump campaign supporter himself, has plenty of connections with the new regime in Washington.