Palantir
Palantir Technologies Inc. ( PAL-ən-TEER) is an American publicly traded company that develops data integration and analytics software. Palantir is headquartered in Miami, Florida, and was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Stephen Cohen, Joe Lonsdale, Alex Karp, and Nathan Gettings.
Overview
Palantir Technologies Inc. ( PAL-ən-TEER) is an American publicly traded company that develops data integration and analytics software. Palantir is headquartered in Miami, Florida, and was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Stephen Cohen, Joe Lonsdale, Alex Karp, and Nathan Gettings. Palantir's customer base includes federal agencies, state and local governments, international organizations, and also private companies. The company has four main operating systems: Gotham, Foundry, Apollo, and AIP. Gotham is an intelligence tool used by militaries and counter-terrorism analysts, including the United States Intelligence Community and United States Department of Defense. Multiple police departments have used Gotham for crime analysis. Apollo is a platform to facilitate continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) across all environments. Its software as a service (SaaS) is one of five offerings the U.S. Department of Defense authorized for Mission Critical National Security Systems (IL5). Palantir has been used for data integration and analysis by corporate clients such as Morgan Stanley, Merck KGaA, Airbus, Wejo, Lilium, PG&E and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. Palantir has been criticized for its involvement in expanding government surveillance through artificial intelligence and facial recognition systems. Critics have raised concerns about its contracts with the Trump administration and the aggregation of sensitive data on Americans. Civil liberties organizations have criticized Palantir's police technology as predictive policing. CEO Alex Karp disputes this characterization. Others observe that Palantir does not collect or store data, but only helps analyze data that customers have already collected and provides services and platforms where customers retain the rights, although examples of data management failures have been noted. Some note the active or passive responsibility of Thiel and Karp in allowing conspiracy theories about Palantir to spread.
2003–2008: Founding and early years
Palantir was founded in 2003. Thiel named the startup after the "seeing stone" in J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium. Likewise, Palantir's office locations have names from Tolkien: The Shire (Palo Alto, California), Rivendell (McLean, Virginia), and Grey Havens (London, U.K.). In 2013, Thiel said Palantir was a "mission-oriented company" that could apply software similar to PayPal's fraud recognition systems to "reduce terrorism while preserving civil liberties". In 2004, Thiel bankrolled the creation of a prototype by PayPal engineer Nathan Gettings and Stanford University students Joe Lonsdale and Stephen Cohen. The same year, he hired Alex Karp, a former colleague of his from Stanford Law School, as chief executive officer. There are at least four versions of the story of Palantir's founding, but they all say that Thiel and Karp produced software that others found applications for. According to The Wall Street Journal, when Palantir launched in 2004, there were three investors other than Thiel and Karp but little interest from venture capital firms, so Thiel and his venture fund largely bankrolled the initial $30 million cost. CIA-affiliated venture capital firm In-Q-Tel invested about $2 million. According to Techcrunch, Oakhouse Partners led Palantir's $7.5 million Series A (June 2006) and REV led its $10.5 million Series B (November 2006). In its early years, Palantir maintained founder control by declining to offer board seats to investors, including In-Q-Tel. This practice continued through subsequent funding rounds. The New Republic called Karp's formation of Palantir an embrace of techno-militarism to advance American global supremacy through hard power and targeted violence. The Wall Street Journal said Palantir had a "pro-America ethos" from its inception, highlighting a 2025 fellowship where fellows received a four-week seminar on Western civilization and whether it was worth defending. According to the Journal, for two years the company continuously revised its technology based on the demands of analysts from the intelligence agencies, introduced to them by In-Q-Tel. A 2009 VentureBeat article said that most of the intelligence community knew about the company by word of mouth. In its early years its work included a subprime lender study for Center for Public Integrity and analyses of Somali piracy, Hezbollah, and the platform used to detect the Chinese GhostNet. Palantir said computers alone using artificial intelligence could not defeat an adaptive adversary. Instead, it proposed using human analysts to explore data from many sources, called intelligence augmentation.
2010–2012: Expansion
In April 2010, Palantir announced a partnership with Thomson Reuters to sell the Palantir Metropolis product as "QA Studio" (a quantitative analysis tool). On June 18, 2010, Vice President of the United States Joe Biden and Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag held a press conference at the White House announcing the success of fighting fraud in the stimulus by the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (RATB). Biden credited Palantir with supporting the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board's fraud detection efforts, highlighting specific cases identified through the system. He announced that the capability would be deployed at other government agencies, starting with Medicare and Medicaid. Industry analysts estimated Palantir's 2011 revenues at approximately $250 million.
2013–2017: Additional funding
A document leaked to TechCrunch revealed that Palantir's clients as of 2013 included at least 12 groups in the U.S. government, including the CIA, the DHS, the NSA, the FBI, the CDC, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, the Special Operations Command, the United States Military Academy, the Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Organization and Allies, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. At the time, the United States Army continued to use its own data analysis tool. Also according to TechCrunch, U.S. intelligence agencies such as the CIA and FBI were linked for the first time with Palantir software, as their databases had previously been siloed. In September 2013, Palantir disclosed over $196 million in funding, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing. It was estimated that the company would likely sign almost $1 billion in contracts in 2014. CEO Alex Karp announced in 2013 that the company would not pursue an IPO, as going public would make "running a company like ours very difficult". In December 2013, the company began a round of financing, raising around $450 million from private funders. This raised the company's value to $9 billion, according to Forbes, with the magazine reporting that the valuation made Palantir "among Silicon Valley's most valuable private technology companies". In December 2014, Forbes reported that Palantir was looking to raise $400 million in an additional round of financing, after the company filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission the month before. The report was based on research by VC Experts. If completed, Forbes said Palantir's funding could reach $1.2 billion. As of December 2014, the company continued to have diverse private funders, Ken Langone and Stanley Druckenmiller, In-Q-Tel of the CIA, Tiger Global Management, and Founders Fund, a venture firm operated by Thiel. Palantir was valued at $15 billion in November 2014. In June 2015, BuzzFeed reported the company was raising up to $500 million in new capital at a valuation of $20 billion. By December, it had raised a further $880 million, while the company was still valued at $20 billion. In February 2016, Palantir bought Kimono Labs, a startup that makes it easy to collect information from public-facing websites. In August 2016, Palantir acquired data visualization startup Silk. In 2017, BuzzFeed News reported that Palantir's footing at the CIA and especially the NSA were not stable. But according to Karp, Palantir had a firm hold at the FBI because "They'll have no choice".
2018–present
Palantir was one of four large technology firms to start working with the NHS on supporting COVID-19 efforts through the provision of software from Palantir Foundry, and by April 2020, several countries had used Palantir's technology to track contagion. Palantir also developed Tiberius, a software for vaccine allocation used in the United States. In August 2020, Palantir Technologies moved its headquarters to Denver, Colorado, distancing itself from the "engineering elite of Silicon Valley ... they do not know more about how society should be organized or what justice requires". In September it became a publicly traded company with a direct listing on the NYSE, advertising a goal of becoming the "default operating system across the US". In December 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration awarded Palantir a $44.4 million contract, boosting its shares by about 21%. In February 2023, Palantir reported its first quarter of positive GAAP net income, totaling $31 million. In November 2024, the Navy awarded Palantir a nearly $1 billion software contract. Various outlets have said that the company's actual business and size remain small. In 2025, Fortune noted that Palantir, with a market capitalization exceeding $400 billion, ranked among the world's most valuable companies by market cap, yet would fail to meet Fortune 500 revenue thresholds (requiring $50+ billion annually in sales). The company's headcount in August 2025 was 4,100, but Karp wanted to reduce it to 3,600. As of May 2025, the second Trump administration had spent $113 million on existing and new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and The Pentagon plus a contract of $795 million with the DOD, while deliberating contracts for the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service. In 2025, Palantir helped fund the White House's East Wing demolition and planned building of a ballroom. In February 2026, Palantir announced plans to move its headquarters from Denver, Colorado, to Miami, Florida.
Valuation
The company was valued at $9 billion in December 2013 after raising an additional $107.5 million in funding. Forbes wrote that the valuation made Palantir "among Silicon Valley's most valuable private technology companies". Palantir's valuation rose to $15 billion after a $50 million round of funding in November 2014, and to $20 billion in late 2015 as the company closed an $880 million round of funding. In 2018, Morgan Stanley valued the company at $6 billion. On October 18, 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported that Palantir considered an IPO in the first half of 2019 following a $41 billion valuation. Before its IPO, Palantir had not made a profit. In July 2020, it filed for an IPO, and on September 30, 2020, it went public on the New York Stock Exchange through a direct public offering under the ticker symbol "PLTR". On September 6, 2024, S&P Global announced that Palantir would be added to the S&P 500 index. Its share price rose 14% the next trading day. On November 14, Palantir announced transfer of its stock listing from the New York Stock Exchange to the Nasdaq Global Select Market effective November 26. The company's Class A Common Stock continued to trade under the symbol PLTR. In 2025, The Economist called Palantir possibly "the most over-valued firm of all time", with a market value of $430 billion—over 600 times its 2024 earnings. As of November 2025, its shares were the most expensive on the S&P 500, at 85 times expected forward annual sales. Palantir was unprofitable for 20 years, reporting its first quarter of positive net income under non-GAAP metrics in Q4 2022 and its first quarter of positive GAAP net income in Q1 2023, totaling $31 million.
Investments
Palantir invested approximately $400 million in roughly 20 SPACs, a strategy that simultaneously positioned it as an investor in emerging companies and as a potential software provider to those portfolio companies, according to investment bank RBC Capital Markets.
Palantir Gotham
Released in 2008, Palantir Gotham is Palantir's defense and intelligence software. It is an evolution of Palantir's longstanding work in the United States Intelligence Community, and is used by intelligence and defense agencies. Among other things, the software supports alerts, geospatial analysis, and prediction. Foreign customers include the Ukrainian military. Palantir Gotham has also been used as a predictive policing system, which has elicited some controversy over racism in their AI analytics.
Palantir Foundry
Palantir Foundry is a software platform offered for use in commercial and civil government sectors. Foundry gained prominence in healthcare through deployment in the National COVID Cohort Collaborative, a federated network of electronic health records. Research using this platform generated extensive peer-reviewed publications and won the NIH/FASEB Dataworks Grand Prize. NHS England also used Foundry in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic to analyze the operation of the vaccination program. As of 2022, Foundry was also used for the administration of the UK Homes for Ukraine program to give caseworkers employed by local authorities access to data held by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and the Home Office. In November 2023, NHS England awarded Palantir a seven-year contract valued at £330 million to design and operate a Federated Data Platform connecting patient data across England's healthcare system. The contract was immediately criticized by the British Medical Association, The Doctors' Association UK, and cybersecurity professionals, citing concerns about patient data privacy, procurement transparency, and Palantir's commercial contracts with the Israel Defense Forces. NHS England originally published the contract in December 2023 with more than 70% of its pages redacted, prompting legal action that resulted in its republication with partial disclosure. In 2024, medical professionals picketed outside NHS England HQ, demanding the deal's cancellation. As of May 2025, four US federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services, used Foundry.
Other products
The company has been involved in a number of business and consumer products, designing in part or in whole. For example, in 2014, it premiered Insightics, which according to The Wall Street Journal "extracts customer spending and demographic information from merchants' credit-card records". It was created in tandem with credit processing company First Data.
Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP)
In April 2023, the company launched Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), which integrates large language models into privately operated networks. The company demonstrated its use in war, where a military operator could deploy operations and receive responses via an AI chatbot. Citing potential risks of generative AI, Karp said the product would not let the AI independently carry out targeting operations, but would require human oversight. Commercial companies have also used AIP across many domains. Applications include infrastructure planning, network analysis, and resource allocation. AIP lets users create LLMs called "agents" through a graphical user interface. Agents can interact with a digital representation of a company's business known as an ontology. This lets the models access an organization's documents and other external resources. Users can define output schemas and test cases to validate AI-generated responses. AIP comes with a library of templates that can be extended by clients. Palantir also offers five-day boot camps to onboard prospective customers. Palantir hosts an annual AIPCon conference featuring demos from existing customers.
TITAN
Palantir's TITAN (Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node) is a mobile command vehicle equipped with AI and analytics software for military field intelligence operations. Developed with IRAD funding in partnership with Anduril Industries and Northrop Grumman, TITAN integrates intelligence and targeting data to support tactical decision-making. The company claims that TITAN can improve customers' ability to conduct long-range precision strikes. Palantir is under contract to deliver 10 units to the U.S. Army.
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