When Palantir hit the stock market in September 2020, there was a lot that could go wrong. The Covid pandemic was sweeping across the globe, society was in lockdown and markets were volatile.

Meanwhile, Palantir was operating at a loss while dealing with ongoing criticism over its government work, in particular with U.S. Customs and Immigration. And the company was going public through a direct listing rather than a traditional IPO.

At its opening price of $10 per share, Palantir was valued at $16.5 billion, down from its private market peak of $20.4 billion in 2015.

“It was the beginning of the pandemic, no one knew what was happening,” CFO David Glazer said in an interview. “The stock market wasn’t ripping, everyone wasn’t trying to go public, and we decided to go public as quickly as possible.”

Exactly five years later, Palantir has reached heights that would’ve been hard for even the biggest bulls to fathom.

The stock price has surged more than 1,700%, closing on Tuesday at $182.42 for a market cap of over $432 billion. That puts it among the 20 most-valuable U.S. companies, and above tech stalwarts like Cisco and IBM. Last year, Palantir joined the S&P 500, replacing American Airlines.

Quarterly revenue surpassed $1 billion for the first time last quarter, and is expected to reach $4.2 billion this year, according to analysts surveyed by LSEG, up almost sixfold from 2019. The company’s roster of customers grew from 125 in the first half of 2020 to 849 at the end of June. During that time, Palantir has added 1,500 full-time employees.

CEO Alex Karp, who founded the company in 2003 alongside notable investors like Peter Thiel and Joe Lonsdale, was exerting optimism on day one of Palantir’s life on the public market.

“We’ve reached a base where our company is very significant,” Karp, who holds a law degree from Stanford and PhD in neoclassical social theory from Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, told CNBC in an interview on listing day. “Being in the public space will help us with our clients and help us grow.”

Its dizzying ascent since then has perplexed Wall Street, which is unfamiliar with these kinds of multiples, especially for companies of this size.

Palantir trades for 226 times earnings over the next 12 months, with a forward revenue multiple of over 80. Those numbers dwarf even the multiples on Tesla, which trades for 194 times forward earnings and 14 times revenue over the next year.

In a report last month, Citron Research’s Andrew Left, a noted short-seller, called Palantir “detached from fundamentals and analysis.” When compared to OpenAI’s recent $500 billion valuation, he said Palantir should be priced at $40, or less than one-quarter of its current price, if it was assessed the same revenue multiple as the artificial intelligence startup.

“Karp and his team should be proud. But for investors, that’s where discipline kicks in,” Left wrote. “Comparison is the enemy of happiness, and when measured against true AI leaders, Palantir’s price already reflects success beyond its fundamentals.”

Karp, who doesn’t shy away from a dispute, recently told detractors to “exit” if they “don’t like the price.”

“We are going to be the most important software company in the world, and people will figure out what that’s valued over a long period of time,” Karp said on the day of the company’s NYSE debut.

Palantir declined to make Karp available for an interview.

Valuation isn’t the only source of controversy. Critics have also raised concerns about how Palantir’s tools are being used by the likes of ICE and other government agencies.

Palantir was founded as a response to national security threats in the wake of 9/11. The company developed hefty software that it helped customize for clients to enable them to compile and analyze large data sets. On its website, Palantir says that it’s partnered with the U.S. Army since 2008, “embedding alongside users to design and deploy modern mission essential software solutions.”

Federal documents from April show that ICE paid Palantir $30 million to provide “real-time visibility” on people self-deporting. Earlier this year, the New York Times reported that Palantir is helping the Trump administration gather data on Americans.

In a blog post, Palantir called the reporting “reckless and irresponsible.” Karp said in a June interview with CNBC that Palantir was “not surveilling Americans.”

In a letter to investors ahead of its direct listing, Karp said, “the engineering elite” of Silicon Valley do not know “how society should be organized or what justice requires” and that the company shares “fewer and fewer of the technology sector’s values and commitments.”

While Palantir has been a standout performer on the market over the past five years, long-term investors had to weather some dark days along the way.

By the end of 2020, Palantir’s stock had jumped to $23.55, a gain of almost 136%. In Karp’s letter ahead of the direct listing, he asserted that “effective software can be essential to an organization’s survival” during times of crisis.

Skepticism started building in the second half of 2021. Early the following year, rising interest rates and soaring inflation pushed investors out of risky securities and into safer assets like bonds. Palantir shares lost two-thirds of their value in 2022, closing the year at $6.42, well below the direct listing price.

But November of that year brought with it the introduction of ChatGPT and a new era of AI that revived and redefined the tech industry.

Palantir launched its AI platform called AIP in April 2023. It was designed to help securely integrate large language models when dealing with sensitive data, making it much faster and more efficient for Palantir’s technology to pull in and analyze information.

The company has attributed much of its expansion in the commercial market to AIP. Government business still accounts for most of its revenue, but Palantir has attracted corporate clients such as Wendy’s and American Airlines.

Glazer said on the latest earnings call in August that the total contract value of bookings in the quarter soared 185% to $1.1 billion, with U.S. commercial revenue jumping 93% from a year earlier.

“AIP continues to drive existing customer expansion and new customer conversions in the U.S.,” Glazer said.

One customer the company cited was auto supplier Lear and a recent five-year partnership between the two. Palantir said that Lear uses AIP for help with “proactively managing their tariff exposure, automating multiple administrative workflows, and dynamically balancing their manufacturing lines.”

Palantir’s stock soared 341% last year and is up another 141% so far in 2025.

The AI is getting a lot of use in government, too.

In 2024, Palantir landed a contract to create AI-powered mobile ground stations able to collect data for soldiers using space sensors. In May of this year, the Pentagon lifted the company’s total ceiling for its Maven Smart Systems contract for AI capabilities to $1.3 billion.

Akash Jain, Palantir’s technology chief and president of its U.S. government business, said in an interview that AI has created a whole new set of risks, forcing the government to rethink how it uses commercial technologies.

 “We’re perfectly positioned for the growth,” he said.

WATCH: Cramer on Palantir

Jennifer Garner’s baby food company Once Upon a Farm announced on Monday it has filed a registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). It intends to list its common stock under the ticker “OFRM” on the New York Stock Exchange pending approval.

The company increased its six-month revenue as of Jun. 30 by 66% according to its IPO filing. The company acknowledged in the filing that it has a “history of losses, and we cannot be certain that we will achieve or sustain profitability.”

Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan are acting as joint lead underwriters for the proposed offering, the company shared in a statement.

Founded in 2015 by Cassandra Curtis and Ari Raz, Once Upon a Farm sells food for babies and kids, according to its website. They founded the company with a mission to provide nutritious and convenient food for babies before expanding their offerings to children of all ages.

The Berkeley-based company sells a variety of refrigerated pouches and oat bars, frozen meals, and pantry snacks. All of its over 115 products are organic, non-GMO, contain no added sugar, and are free from artificial flavors, colors, and preservatives, the company said in a statement.

A 15-pack of their best-selling Dairy-Free Smoothie Variety Pack retails for $61.50, according to its website.

Garner, a Golden Globe Award winner known for her starring role as Sydney Bristow in the ABC spy drama Alias, joined Once Upon a Farm as a co-founder in 2017. She posts about her family farm in Locust Grove, Oklahoma, which the company says is a source of inspiration for their products, to her personal Instagram account.

Once Upon a Farm did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

After a long wait to get public, StubHub has had a rough start to life on the New York Stock Exchange.

Shares of the online ticket vendor dropped 10% on Friday, falling for a third straight day since debuting on Wednesday. At $18.46, the stock is now down 21% from its IPO price of $23.50.

StubHub, trading under ticker symbol “STUB,” has lagged behind fellow market newcomers like online lender Klarna, design software company Figma and stablecoin issuer Circle, which delivered early returns for investors following their recent IPOs. Shares of cybersecurity firm Netskope also rose 10% on Friday in their second trading day, after an initial pop on Thursday.

StubHub had been trying to go public for the past several years, but delayed its debut twice. The most recent stall came in April after President Donald Trump’s announcement of sweeping tariffs roiled markets. The company filed an updated prospectus in August, effectively restarting the process to go public, and has since seen its market cap slip to about $6.8 billion from $8.6 billion at its IPO.

Founded in 2000, StubHub primarily generates revenue from connecting buyers with ticket resellers. In the first quarter, revenue rose 10% from a year earlier to $397.6 million. The company’s net loss widened to $35.9 million from $29.7 million a year ago.

StubHub CEO Eric Baker told CNBC on Wednesday that the company expects recently introduced federal regulations around transparent ticket pricing to cause a “one-time” hit to its financial results.

Regulators are zeroing in on online ticket sellers over their pricing mechanisms and whether the companies are doing enough to keep automated purchasing bots in check. The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday sued StubHub rival Live Nation Entertainment, the parent company of Ticketmaster, accusing it of illegal resale tactics.

While StubHub has failed to excite Wall Street, its struggles haven’t seeped into other deals as the tech IPO market continues to show signs of a resurgence after an extended dry spell. Amazon reseller Pattern Group saw its stock rise 12% on Friday, though shares initially slipped 6%.

WATCH: StubHub CEO on company’s IPO

StubHub shares opened at $25.35 in their New York Stock Exchange debut on Wednesday after the online ticket seller priced its IPO in the middle of its expected range.

The pricing late Tuesday at $23.50 per share raised $800 million for the company, now trading under ticker symbol “STUB.”

StubHub’s long-awaited IPO comes after the company paused its plans in April, when President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs sent the stock market into a tailspin. It was the second such delay, after market volatility forced StubHub to temporarily shelve its IPO plans in July 2024.

The IPO is the latest in a flurry of tech offerings as the market rebounds from a dismal few years. Swedish buy now, pay later firm Klarna and Gemini, the crypto firm founded by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, rose in their respective debuts last week. Peter Thiel-backed cryptocurrency exchange Bullish, design software company Figma and stablecoin issuer Circle have also hit the market in recent months.

StubHub has been through a number of transactions in its 25-year history to get to this point. It was purchased by eBay for $310 million in 2007, but was reacquired by its co-founder Eric Baker in 2020 for roughly $4 billion through his new company Viagogo.

StubHub has benefited from a resurgence in the live events market in the years following the Covid lockdowns. Sales have also boomed from massively popular shows like Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour and Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour, as well as sporting events like the Super Bowl.

The company said in its updated prospectus filed last month that those sorts of events can also make StubHub’s revenues lumpy and difficult to predict.

In the first quarter, StubHub reported revenue growth of 10% from a year earlier to $397.6 million. Its net loss widened to $35.9 million from $29.7 million a year ago. Gross merchandise sales, which represent the total dollar value paid by ticket buyers, reached $2.08 billion in the three months ended March 31.

StubHub primarily generates revenue from connecting buyers with ticket resellers. More than 40 million tickets were sold on StubHub’s marketplace last year from roughly one million sellers, the company said in August.

It competes with Vivid Seats, which was taken public via a special purpose acquisition company in 2021, SeatGeek and Ticketmaster parent Live Nation Entertainment.

The Federal Trade Commission is in the advanced stages of probing Ticketmaster over whether it’s done enough to keep automated bots from circumventing its per-person ticket limits for popular events, Bloomberg reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The FTC in May sent a warning letter to StubHub saying it must comply with the agency’s “junk fees” rule and alleging some of its ticket listings failed to display the total price, including all mandatory fees and charges.

Madrone Partners is StubHub’s largest investor with ownership of 24.5% of Class A shares prior to the offering. WestCap is second at 12.3%, followed by Bessemer Venture Partners at 8.8%.

WATCH: StubHub CEO on IPO

Klarna shares popped 30% in their New York Stock Exchange debut Wednesday, opening at $52, after the Swedish online lender priced its IPO above its expected range.

The company, known for its popular buy now, pay later products, priced shares at $40 on Tuesday, raising $1.37 billion for the company and existing shareholders. The offering valued Klarna at about $15 billion.

The IPO marks the latest in a growing list of high-profile tech IPOs this year, suggesting increased demand from Wall Street for new offerings. Companies like stablecoin issuer Circle and design software platform Figma soared in their respective debuts. Meanwhile, crypto exchange Gemini is expected to go public later this week.

“To me, it really just is a milestone,” Klarna’s co-founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told CNBC in an interview on Wednesday. “It’s a little bit like a wedding. You prepare so much and you plan for it and it’s a big party. But in the end — marriage goes on.”

The stock slipped to about $47 by mid-day, valuing the company at around $18 billion.

Klarna’s entry into the public markets will test Wall Street’s excitement about the direction of its business. The company has in recent months talked up its move into banking, rolling out a debit card and personal deposit accounts in the U.S.

Klarna has signed 700,000 card customers in the U.S. so far and has 5 million people on a waiting list seeking access to the product, Siemiatkowski told CNBC. He added that Klarna Card represents a different proposition to rival fintech Affirm’s card offering, which has attracted 2 million users since its launch in 2021.

“We’re attracting a slightly different audience maybe than the Affirm card,” Siemiatkowski said. “I get the impression that is more a card where people use it simply to be able to have financing with interest on slightly higher tickets.”

In addition to Affirm, Klarna also competes with Afterpay, which was acquired for $29 billion in 2021 by Square, now a unit of Block.

Klarna faces some potential regulatory headwinds. In the U.K., the government has proposed new rules to bring BNPL loans under formal oversight to address affordability concerns regarding the market.

The IPO is poised to generate billions of dollars in returns for some of Klarna’s long-time investors. Existing shareholders are offering the bulk of Klarna shares— 28.8 million — on the public market. At its IPO price of $40, that translates to over $1.2 billion. Meanwhile, Klarna raised $222 million from the IPO.

Sequoia, which first backed in Klarna in 2010, has invested $500 million in total. The venture firm sold 2 million of its 79 million shares in the IPO, meaning it’s generated an overall return of about $2.65 billion, based on the offer price.

Andrew Reed, a partner at Sequoia, told CNBC that he was still in college when Sequoia made its first investment in an “alternative payments company in Stockholm.” The early work, he said, was around expanding in Europe.

“Being here in New York 15 years later with over 100 million consumers and over $100 billion of GMV [gross merchandise value] and close to a million merchants, it is staggering what one year after another of execution and growth and Sebastian’s long-term vision can do,” Reed said.

Another Klarna investor hasn’t been so lucky. Japan’s SoftBank led a 2021 funding round in Klarna at a $46 billion valuation and has since seen the value of its stake plunge significantly.

WATCH: CNBC’s interview with Klarna CEO Sebastian Siematkowski

The Peter Thiel-backed cryptocurrency exchange Bullish filed for an IPO on Friday, the latest digital asset firm to head for the public market.

The company, led by CEO Tom Farley, a veteran of the finance industry and former president of the New York Stock Exchange, said it plans to trade on the NYSE under the ticker symbol “BLSH.”

A spinout of Block.one, Bullish started with an initial investment from backers including Thiel’s Founders Fund and Thiel Capital, along with Nomura, Mike Novogratz and others. Bullish acquired crypto news site CoinDesk in 2023.

“In the first quarter of 2025, Bullish exchange executed over $2.5 billion in average daily volume, ranking in the top five exchanges by spot volume for Bitcoin and Ether,” the company said on its website. The prospectus listed top competitors as Binance, Coinbase and Kraken.

The IPO filing says that as of March 31, the total trading volume since launch has exceeded $1.25 trillion.

The filing is another significant step for the cryptocurrency industry, which has fought for years to convince institutions to embrace digital assets as legitimate investments.

It’s already been a big year on the market for crypto offerings, highlighted by stablecoin issuer Circle, which has jumped more than sevenfold since its IPO in June. Etoro, an online trading platform that includes services for crypto investors, debuted in May.

Novogratz’s crypto firm Galaxy Digital started trading on the Nasdaq in May, moving its listing from the Toronto Stock Exchange. And in June, Gemini, the cryptocurrency exchange and custodian founded by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, confidentially filed for an IPO in the U.S.

Meanwhile, investors continue to flock to bitcoin. The digital currency is trading at over $117,000, up from about $94,000 at the start of the year.

President Donald Trump, on Friday, signed the GENIUS Act into law — a set of regulations that establish some initial consumer protections around stablecoins, which are tied to assets like the U.S. dollar with the intent of reducing price volatility associated with many cryptocurrencies.

In its filing with the SEC, Bullish says its mission is partly to “drive the adoption of stablecoins, digital assets, and blockchain technology.”

Crypto industry players, including Thiel, Elon Musk, and President Trump’s AI and Crypto czar David Sacks spent heavily to re-elect Trump and have pushed for legislation that legitimizes digital assets and exchanges.

WATCH: Trump’s crypto plan

President Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform moved a step closer to having a bitcoin exchange-traded fund available to everyday investors.

NYSE Arca, the all-electronic arm of the New York Stock Exchange that handles most ETF trading, filed on Tuesday to list a bitcoin fund linked to the president’s media company, the latest sign of Trump’s expanding push into the crypto world. Known as a 19b-4 form, the filing is required before regulators can decide whether to allow the fund to launch and trade on a U.S. exchange.

Called the Truth Social Bitcoin ETF, the fund is designed to track the price of bitcoin and offer a simpler way for investors to gain exposure without holding the asset directly. The filing follows an announced partnership between Trump Media and Crypto.com in March to bring a suite of digital asset products to market later this year, pending regulatory approval.

Those planned offerings include baskets of cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin and Crypto.com’s native Cronos token, combined with traditional securities. The products will be branded under Trump Media and made available to global investors through major brokerage platforms and the Crypto.com app, which serves more than 140 million users worldwide.

Since the January 2024 launch of spot bitcoin ETFs, the market has swelled to more than $130 billion in total assets. BlackRock‘s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) accounts for the lion’s share, with nearly $69 billion in assets, making it the largest digital asset manager in the world.

Trump is the majority owner of Truth Social’s parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group, which has made a series of crypto-aligned moves in recent months — from trademarking digital asset products to unveiling a $2.5 billion bitcoin treasury plan last week in Las Vegas. If approved, the ETF would represent one of the most politically connected entries into the booming market for bitcoin funds.

WATCH: SEC Commissioner Peirce on dropping Binance case: We’re writing the rules first, then enforcing

Newsmax went public on the New York Stock Exchange on Monday, as the conservative cable news network audience has grown after the election of President Donald Trump and other right-wing politicians.

The network began trading under the symbol “NMAX” late Monday morning, opening at $14 a share after pricing at $10 a share. It soared more than 700% in volatile trading on Monday.

Newsmax’s stock closed at $83.51 for the day.

In September, Newsmax announced its plans for an initial public offering in early 2025. On Friday, the company said it raised $75 million through the sale of 7.5 million shares of Class B common stock at a price of $10 per share.

A pure-play TV network IPO in the U.S. is a rarity, with Dealogic data showing there hasn’t been one comparable to Newsmax in recent decades. Newsmax’s IPO comes at a time when traditional cable TV has suffered as consumers flee the bundle in favor of streaming. Now, news and live sports nab the biggest audiences and most advertising revenue dollars.

The debut also comes as the audience for right-wing prime-time content has grown with the rise of Trump and other right-leaning politicians in recent elections.

Christopher Ruddy, the company’s founder and CEO, said Monday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that he saw an opportunity to join the mix since Fox Corp.’s Fox News didn’t have a competitor in the “center right market.”

“I think there was a demand for more competition against Fox,” Ruddy said Monday. Ruddy founded Newsmax in 1998 as a digital offering before it became a cable TV network in 2014.

While the cable news landscape is dominated by Fox News, CNN and MSNBC, Newsmax has grown its audience in recent years and is offered through most major pay-TV providers.

Ruddy on Monday said that Newsmax is the “No. 4 cable news channel in the United States, right behind CNN.” Nielsen confirmed Monday that Newsmax ratings have “consistently” been in the fourth spot behind Fox News, MSNBC and CNN.

Still, Newsmax’s audience has yet to reach the breadth of Fox News, according to Nielsen data. Between Dec. 30 and March 20, Newsmax had an average of 309,000 primetime viewers and 211,000 daytime viewers. Fox News attracted an average of nearly 3.1 million primetime viewers and roughly 2 million daytime viewers during the same period.

Overall, Newsmax ranks in the top 20 among cable network average viewership in both prime time and daytime, Nielsen said Monday.

“I think it’s a pretty big achievement for a 10-year-old, new cable company,” Ruddy said Monday on “Squawk Box.”

As its popularity has risen, Newsmax has negotiated receiving licensing fees from cable TV providers. In its early days, Newsmax relied on advertising revenue. In 2023, it resolved a dispute with DirecTV — which led to it being dropped from the pay TV provider for a short period — after pushing to receive fees.

As the company went public, Ruddy downplayed the pro-Trump leanings of Newsmax — which reached a $40 million settlement last year with Smartmatic over the network’s false claims that the voting machine company helped to rig the 2020 presidential election in favor of former President Joe Biden.

“We believe we’re conservative with an independent news mission, and ask tough questions of the Trump administration,” Ruddy said Monday on “Squawk Box.”

In a post on social media platform X on Tuesday, Ruddy said he received a call from Trump and that the conversation touched on various topics, including the company’s upcoming IPO. “I shared with Potus my new saying: ‘A rising Trump lifts all boats!'” Ruddy wrote.