Palantir

Palantir Technologies Inc. () 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.

History

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…