Palantir Technologies

Palantir Technologies Inc.
Type	Public
Traded as	Nasdaq: PLTR S&P 500 component
Industry	Software Big data Defence and intelligence
Founded	2003
Founder	Peter Thiel Alex Karp Joe Lonsdale Stephen Cohen Nathan Gettings
Headquarters	Denver, Colorado, United States; relocating to Miami, Florida
Key people	Alex Karp (Chief executive officer) Peter Thiel (Chairman) Shyam Sankar (Chief technology officer) Ryan Taylor (Chief revenue and legal officer)
Products	Palantir Gotham, Palantir Foundry, Palantir Apollo, Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP)
Employees	Approximately 4,000
Website	palantir.com

Palantir Technologies Inc. is an American software company that builds platforms for integrating, analysing and acting on large and heterogeneous bodies of data. Its principal customers are governments, defence and intelligence agencies, police forces and large industrial corporations, and it is among the most politically contested technology companies in the world.

The company was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen and Nathan Gettings, and took its name from the seeing-stones of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, objects which show their user true but partial and potentially misleading visions of distant events, a choice the founders have described as deliberate and which critics have noted is not obviously flattering.

Its two original products are Gotham, built for defence and intelligence work and used to combine signals intelligence, imagery, documents and human reporting into a single navigable picture, and Foundry, built for commercial and civil government use and used to construct an integrated operational model of an organisation's activity. Apollo manages the deployment of software across classified and disconnected environments, and the Artificial Intelligence Platform, released in 2023, connects large language models to an organisation's own data and operations under human review.

Palantir listed by direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2020 and moved to Nasdaq in November 2024. It joined the S&P 500 in September 2024. Its market value passed US$400 billion in 2025, placing it among the most valuable companies in the world while its revenue, at roughly US$3 billion for 2024 and growing rapidly, would not have qualified it for the Fortune 500. Its headcount in August 2025 was approximately 4,000, an unusually small number for a company of that valuation.

The company's work has drawn sustained opposition. Its contracts with United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and specifically the Immigration Lifecycle Operating System developed from 2025, have been described by critics including the Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham as building the infrastructure of a police state. Its role in the National Health Service in England, in European police forces, in Israeli military operations and in Ukrainian targeting has each produced organised objection, litigation or parliamentary inquiry.

History

Founding, 2003 to 2008

Palantir's origin lies in PayPal's fraud detection.

PayPal had faced organised fraud at a scale that threatened the business, and had found that purely automated detection failed against adversaries who adapted. The approach that worked combined algorithmic flagging with human analysts who could follow connections between accounts, devices and transactions, a division of labour in which the software surfaced patterns and people decided what they meant.

Peter Thiel, PayPal's co-founder, proposed after its sale to eBay that the same approach could be applied to counter-terrorism, where the failure identified by the 9/11 Commission was not a shortage of information but an inability to connect information held in separate agencies and incompatible systems. He funded the company through Founders Fund and Clarium Capital.

Alex Karp, a Stanford Law School classmate of Thiel's with a doctorate in neoclassical social theory from Goethe University Frankfurt, written under Jürgen Habermas's colleague Karola Brede, became chief executive. The pairing is the company's defining oddity: a libertarian venture capitalist who has backed Republican candidates and a self-described progressive with a German philosophy doctorate who has said he disagrees with Thiel about almost everything except the company.

Joe Lonsdale and Stephen Cohen, then Stanford students, and Nathan Gettings, a PayPal engineer, completed the founding group.

Funding was difficult. Conventional venture capital declined, on the reasoning that selling to government agencies is slow, that the sales cycle is measured in years, and that the required forward-deployed engineering model does not scale in the way software investors expect. The money came instead from Thiel and, notably, from In-Q-Tel, the Central Intelligence Agency's venture arm, which invested approximately US$2 million in 2005 and, more valuably, gave Palantir access to analysts who could tell the engineers what the work actually involved.

The early product was built in close collaboration with those analysts over three years, and the resulting practice, of embedding engineers with customers for extended periods rather than shipping software and providing support, became the company's method and its principal cost.

Palantir's first substantial customers were the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and subsequently the Defense Intelligence Agency, Special Operations Command, and the National Counterterrorism Center. Its use in Iraq and Afghanistan for counter-improvised explosive device work brought it to wider attention, and a period of public conflict followed in which Army officers advocated for Palantir against the service's own Distributed Common Ground System programme, a dispute that reached Congress and that Palantir eventually pursued through litigation.

Expansion and the private years, 2009 to 2019

Palantir grew through the 2010s as one of the most highly valued private companies in the world and one of the least transparent.

Its commercial business began with financial institutions. It worked on the unwinding of the Bernard Madoff fraud, on mortgage fraud at JPMorgan Chase, and on trading surveillance, and the Metropolis product, originally built for hedge fund analytics under the name Palantir Finance, served that market.

Public sector work broadened substantially. The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board used Palantir to detect fraud in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, integrating transactional data with open-source and private records. The Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, the Securities and Exchange Commission and a considerable number of state and municipal bodies became customers.

Police use began in the same period, most visibly in Los Angeles, New York and New Orleans, the last under an arrangement structured as a philanthropic donation which the city council had not been told about and which produced substantial controversy when it was reported in 2018.

The company raised repeatedly at rising valuations, reaching approximately US$20 billion by 2015, and became a subject of scepticism about whether a business dependent on long deployments of expensive engineers could ever produce software-like margins. Reporting in 2016 and 2017 described customer losses including Coca-Cola, American Express and Nasdaq, employee departures and continuing losses.

Project Maven changed the company's position. Google had contracted with the Department of Defense in 2017 to apply computer vision to drone footage, faced an internal revolt in which thousands of employees signed a letter of objection and some resigned, and declined to renew in 2018. Palantir took the contract in 2019. Karp made the contrast explicit and has made it repeatedly since, arguing that a technology company that will not work for the defence of its own country while accepting revenue from authoritarian markets has an incoherent position.

Listing and the artificial intelligence years, 2020 to 2026

Palantir went public by direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange on 30 September 2020, avoiding an underwritten offering. Its S-1 filing was unusual, opening with a letter from Karp attacking Silicon Valley's political culture and stating that the company's software was not for sale to the Chinese Communist Party or to regimes inconsistent with its values.

The pandemic brought new work. Palantir built data platforms for the United States Department of Health and Human Services under the name HHS Protect, for the NHS in England for vaccine distribution and supply, and for several other governments, in each case on emergency contracting terms that later attracted scrutiny.

The share price fell substantially through 2021 and 2022 as growth slowed and as the market repriced unprofitable technology. The recovery from 2023 was driven by the Artificial Intelligence Platform, released that year, which connects large language models to an organisation's operational data and permits them to propose actions that a human approves. Palantir's argument was that the models were the easy part and that the difficult part, the integration of an organisation's data into a coherent and governed model, was what it had spent twenty years building. The argument proved commercially persuasive, particularly in the American commercial market, which had previously been the company's weakness.

Palantir achieved its first annual profit in 2023, was added to the S&P 500 on 6 September 2024, its share price rising 14 per cent on the next trading day, and transferred its listing to Nasdaq on 26 November 2024.

Financial results accelerated sharply. For financial 2024 the company reported revenue of US$2.9 billion, up 28.8 per cent, and net income of US$462 million. For the fourth quarter of 2025 it reported revenue of US$1.4 billion, up 70 per cent year on year, with American commercial revenue up 137 per cent to US$507 million and total contract value of US$4.3 billion in the quarter, and guided to approximately US$2.2 billion for the following quarter implying 61 per cent growth.

Its market capitalisation exceeded US$400 billion in 2025. Fortune noted the unusual position of a company among the most valuable in the world whose revenue would not meet the Fortune 500 threshold, and the valuation has been a subject of continuous argument between investors who regard the growth rate and the government position as justifying it and those who regard the multiple of revenue as without precedent among software companies.

The company moved its headquarters from Palo Alto to Denver in 2020, Karp citing the political monoculture of Silicon Valley, and announced in February 2026 that it would move again to Miami, Florida.

In 2025 Palantir helped fund the demolition of the White House East Wing and the construction of a ballroom, a contribution reported alongside those of other companies and criticised as an expression of the proximity between the company and the administration.

Products

Palantir Gotham

Gotham is the original product, built for defence, intelligence and law enforcement.

Its function is to construct a single object-based model from sources that do not naturally combine: structured databases, intercepted communications, imagery, drone video, documents, reports, financial records, sensor feeds and open-source material. An analyst works with people, places, organisations, events and the relationships between them, rather than with tables and files, and the system maintains the provenance of every assertion so that a conclusion can be traced back to the record that supports it.

The access control model is central and is the feature that has allowed the software into classified environments. Permissions attach to individual data elements rather than to systems, so that an analyst may see that a record exists without seeing its contents, and every access is logged. Palantir has argued consistently that this makes its software a civil liberties improvement over the alternative, in which agencies share data by copying it into spreadsheets with no controls at all. Critics answer that better tooling for surveillance is still tooling for surveillance, and that the audit log protects against individual misuse rather than against institutional policy.

Gotham's most cited application is target identification, in which fragments from many sources are assembled to locate a person or an object, and it has been used in this way in Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Gaza.

Palantir Foundry

Foundry, released in 2016, applies the same underlying ideas to commercial and civil government work.

An organisation's data typically lives in dozens or hundreds of systems that were procured separately and that describe the same things differently. Foundry ingests these and builds what Palantir calls an ontology: a model of the objects the organisation actually deals with, aircraft, patients, shipments, wells, claims, together with their properties, their relationships and the actions that can be taken on them. Analysis, applications and automation are then written against the ontology rather than against the underlying systems, which means that changing a source system does not break everything built on top of it.

The ontology concept is the company's principal intellectual contribution and the thing its competitors have found hardest to replicate, because it is as much a consulting practice as a piece of software: building one requires understanding the business.

Foundry is used by aircraft manufacturers for production, by energy companies for well operations, by health systems for capacity management, by carmakers for supply chain, and by governments for programme administration.

Palantir Apollo

Apollo is the deployment system, and it exists because Palantir's customers include environments that no ordinary software delivery pipeline can reach: classified networks, submarines, forward operating bases, air-gapped facilities and regulated systems that cannot be updated without approval.

It manages continuous delivery across these, handling versioning, rollback, configuration and the constraints of intermittent connectivity, and it is what allows Palantir to operate as a software product company rather than as a consultancy shipping bespoke builds.

Artificial Intelligence Platform

AIP, released in 2023, places large language models inside the Foundry and Gotham environments. The models can read the ontology, call functions defined against it, and propose actions, with the platform enforcing which data a given model may see and requiring human approval for actions that matter.

Palantir's positioning has been that the model is a commodity and the governed connection to real operational data is not, and that an organisation which connects a chatbot directly to its systems without that layer is creating a liability. The product has been the principal driver of the company's commercial growth since 2023 and of its expansion beyond its traditional customer base, and it is marketed heavily through intensive multi-day sessions called boot camps in which a customer's own data is used to build something working within days.

Other products

TITAN, the Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node, is a ground station built for the United States Army under a contract awarded in March 2024 worth approximately US$178 million, the first time the Army had awarded a hardware prime contract to a software company of Palantir's kind. It processes data from space, high-altitude, aerial and terrestrial sensors at the tactical edge to shorten the interval between detection and engagement.

MetaConstellation allocates tasking across commercial and government satellites, allowing a user to request observation of a location and have the system determine which assets can provide it and when. It has been used extensively in Ukraine.

MOSAIC supports targeting workflows across sensors and effects.

Skykit is a ruggedised field kit, carried in backpacks, providing Palantir capability with satellite connectivity in environments without infrastructure.

Palantir Metropolis, formerly Palantir Finance, provided quantitative analysis for financial institutions and has largely been superseded by Foundry.

ELITE supports emergency and disaster response.

Maven Smart System packages the Project Maven capability, originally computer vision applied to drone footage, into a deployable product. NATO acquired Maven Smart System NATO on 25 March 2025, and the system reached full technical operational capability on 22 June 2026. NATO's initial report of 30 June 2026 stated that it is compatible with other artificial intelligence systems including those of Meta and of France's Mistral.

Customers

United States government

Palantir's American government business spans defence, intelligence, law enforcement, health and civil administration.

Defence and intelligence customers include the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, Special Operations Command, the Army, the Air Force, the Navy, the Space Force and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. The Army awarded the Army Vantage data platform contract and subsequently the TITAN and Next Generation Command and Control programmes; the latter, awarded in 2025 with a ceiling reported at approximately US$10 billion, consolidates a large number of Army software contracts.

The Department of Defense's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, the Maven programme and the Joint All-Domain Command and Control effort each involve Palantir. Reporting in 2025 indicated a Pentagon arrangement consolidating dozens of separate contracts under a single vehicle worth up to US$10 billion over ten years.

Civil agencies include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Food and Drug Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Education, for which Palantir began developing a portal in December 2025, as a subcontractor to the security company Monkton, allowing universities to report foreign donations under a US$9.8 million contract for a Section 117 information sharing environment.

Immigration work, through Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, is described below and is the most contested part of the business.

Police customers have included the Los Angeles Police Department, the New York Police Department, the New Orleans Police Department, and a number of state fusion centres, with several of these relationships ending after public objection.

United Kingdom

NHS England. Palantir's work for the health service began with the COVID-19 data store in 2020, awarded without competition under emergency provisions and initially for £1, then extended. In November 2023 NHS England awarded a seven-year contract worth up to £330 million for the Federated Data Platform, which links patient and operational data across trusts to support planning, discharge and waiting list management.

The award produced sustained opposition from medical organisations, privacy groups and parts of the profession, on grounds including the company's defence and immigration work, the sensitivity of health records, the adequacy of the procurement, and the absence of a national conversation about who should hold the data. Palantir's answer is that the platform is federated, that data remains under the control of each trust, and that Palantir has no right to access or use it. In September 2026 NHS Cheshire and Merseyside disclosed that data from five general practices had been shared into its local Federated Data Platform, a development that renewed the argument because general practice data had been treated as outside the scheme's scope.

Ministry of Defence. Palantir has supported British defence data work for several years, and in December 2025 was awarded a further contract worth £240 million over three years covering strategic, tactical and live operational decision-making, including interoperability with NATO systems, awarded directly rather than by competition. The award attracted political scrutiny over transparency concerning meetings between British political figures and company representatives.

Financial Conduct Authority. In March 2026 the FCA awarded Palantir a contract to work on its regulatory data, the Guardian reporting that the company had beaten one unnamed competitor. The award raised concern because the FCA holds highly sensitive information about firms and individuals under investigation.

Police. The Metropolitan Police's use has been contested. In February 2026 it was reported that Scotland Yard was using Palantir tools to profile its own officers, examining sickness levels, absence and overtime patterns, and the force refused to confirm or deny aspects of the deployment in response to freedom of information requests. In May 2026 the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, blocked a contract worth up to £50 million between Palantir and the Metropolitan Police, the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime citing concerns about the company's ethics and the force's failure to demonstrate sufficient value for money.

Elsewhere in British policing the record is mixed. In November 2025 Bedfordshire Police used Palantir tools in the prosecution of a gang that had taken approximately £800,000 from cash machines in more than 3,000 withdrawals across the country, analysing seized telephones. The East Midlands Special Operations Unit, covering five forces, began a Foundry project in 2024 and decided in 2026 not to continue. Lancashire Police holds a contract.

Palantir also supported the administration of the Homes for Ukraine programme from 2022, giving local authority caseworkers access to data held by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and by the Home Office.

Europe

NATO acquired the Maven Smart System NATO on 25 March 2025, in what the alliance described as one of its fastest procurements, reaching full technical operational capability on 22 June 2026.

Germany has been Palantir's most politically difficult European market. The federal interior minister Nancy Faeser stopped federal use in 2023. As of July 2025 police in three of the sixteen states, Bavaria, Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia, used the software for data analysis, and Baden-Württemberg entered a contract worth approximately US$25 million in March of that year. The Federal Constitutional Court ruled in February 2023 that the Hesse and Hamburg laws authorising automated data analysis were unconstitutional in their existing form because they permitted the analysis of data about people who were not suspects, and the states rewrote them. The German debate is conducted with particular intensity because of the country's history of state surveillance, and opposition has come from data protection authorities, from parts of the governing coalition and from the Chaos Computer Club.

France contracted with the Directorate-General for Internal Security after the November 2015 Paris attacks and extended the arrangement in 2019. President Emmanuel Macron said that Palantir would retain its role in French intelligence until the end of his term while French alternatives were developed, reflecting a sovereignty concern that has been consistent across French governments.

Denmark has operated POL-INTEL, a predictive policing system based on Gotham, since 2017. The Associated Press described it as building heat maps identifying areas of higher crime. Danish use was re-examined in 2025 during the government's broader review of American technology dependence.

Norway and the Netherlands have both used the software, the Dutch case notably so: in 2025 the justice minister David van Weel confirmed publicly that Dutch police had used Palantir since 2011, a use that had remained largely undisclosed, with researchers seeking transparency repeatedly refused documents over a decade.

Europol has used Palantir for analysis of cross-border organised crime, and the arrangement has been questioned by the European Data Protection Supervisor.

Switzerland was courted from 2018 according to internal federal reports disclosed in late 2025 by the publication Republik. Palantir has offices in Zurich and Bern, and the Defence Department through Armasuisse was initially interested.

Spain has moved against the company: in July 2026 it was reported that the government had directed agencies and companies in which the sovereign wealth fund SEPI holds stakes to avoid Palantir, and that a prospective contract with the shipbuilder Navantia had been blocked.

Italy has been similarly cautious, with a July 2026 report indicating that the only confirmed Italian government contract is a minor open-source data integration arrangement with the defence ministry.

Ukraine has been among the most consequential users since the 2022 invasion. Gotham combines drone video, intercepted communications, satellite imagery and civilian reports submitted through applications including e-Enemy to produce a battlefield picture used for target selection, a function Palantir and Ukrainian officials have both described publicly as shortening the interval between detection and engagement. MetaConstellation is used to task commercial satellites. Karp visited Kyiv in 2022 and the company has said it works with a large number of Ukrainian ministries, including on demining, refugee resettlement and war crimes documentation.

Other countries

Israel has been a customer, and Palantir announced a strategic partnership with the Israeli Ministry of Defense in January 2024 supporting war-related missions, a step taken while other technology companies were avoiding public association. The company held a board meeting in Tel Aviv in January 2024 as a public statement of support. The arrangement is among the reasons for divestment campaigns directed at the company.

Canada has contracted with the military since 2020, with values increasing over time; Public Services and Procurement Canada reported that 18 Palantir employees hold security clearances granting access to sensitive data.

Australia has used Palantir in the Defence Force since 2011, and in February 2026 the Cyber and Electronic Warfare Division signed a contract securing local military use of the ICT System Platform.

Ecuador signed a contract with its National Customs Service in May 2025 targeting drug trafficking and smuggling. Brazil's National Fund for the Development of Education described in 2024 a modernisation of public fund transfers that a Palantir executive identified as the company's work, although the federal transparency portal records no contract. Japan, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates have government or quasi-government arrangements.

Corporate customers

Palantir's commercial business, long the weaker half, has grown very rapidly since the introduction of AIP.

Customers have included Airbus, which used Foundry across A350 production and supply chain; Ferrari in Formula One; BP and other energy companies for well and asset operations; Merck KGaA; Sanofi; Stellantis; United Airlines; Trafigura; Cleveland Clinic and Tampa General Hospital; Rio Tinto; Hyundai Heavy Industries; and a large number of American manufacturers and insurers.

Partnerships have extended the reach. Palantir has arrangements with Microsoft to deliver its products through Azure Government for classified workloads, with Amazon Web Services, with Oracle, with Anthropic, with IBM to sell Foundry through IBM's consulting organisation, with Accenture Federal, with Shield AI, Anduril and other defence technology firms, and with SOMPO in Japan and with Korean and German industrial groups.

Not every relationship has lasted. Reporting in 2016 and 2017 identified departures including Coca-Cola, American Express, Nasdaq, Hershey and Kimberly-Clark, generally attributed to cost and to the difficulty of continuing without Palantir's engineers on site.

Controversies

Immigration enforcement

Palantir's work for United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement is the most sustained source of criticism directed at the company and the one that has most affected its recruitment and its public standing.

The relationship dates to 2014, when ICE's Homeland Security Investigations division adopted the Investigative Case Management system, built on Palantir software, which integrates records from immigration, law enforcement and commercial data brokers to support investigations. A second system, FALCON, supported analysis. Palantir's position throughout has been that its software supports criminal investigations conducted by Homeland Security Investigations rather than civil deportation by Enforcement and Removal Operations, a distinction documents obtained by campaigners have repeatedly undermined, including records showing Investigative Case Management used in workplace raids and in operations targeting the family members of unaccompanied children.

In 2022 the Department of Homeland Security awarded Palantir US$139.3 million for investigative case management operations, maintenance and custom enhancements, a contract still running as of January 2026.

In April 2025 Palantir was reported to be working closely with ICE on deportation under the second Trump administration, with ICE paying approximately US$30 million to develop the Immigration Lifecycle Operating System, known as Immigration OS. The Washington Post reported that the software was intended to track undocumented immigrants with the object of deporting them faster. The project was renewed in September 2025 despite some Palantir employees questioning internally whether the contract should be discontinued if ICE's use of the technology extended into extrajudicial action or breached the company's civil liberties principles. The chief technology officer Shyam Sankar told the New York Times in October 2025 that Immigration OS tracked encounters at the border, asylum applications and benefit applications.

Paul Graham, the co-founder of Y Combinator, wrote that Palantir was building the infrastructure of the police state. The company's continued ICE work coincided with changes to its employee code of conduct made in response to executive orders forbidding federal contractors from diversity practices.

Employee objection has been persistent but has not produced the kind of internal revolt seen at Google over Maven, which observers attribute to self-selection: people who object to defence and immigration work generally do not join Palantir.

Surveillance and the master list

In February 2025 the New York Times reported that the administration and Palantir were compiling a consolidated body of personal information on every American, combining records held by separate departments in ways the reporting described as unlawful and as conferring extensive surveillance power. The account drew on the administration's executive order directing the elimination of information silos and on Palantir's role in several departments.

Palantir responded that it provides software and does not control what customers do with it, and that its platform's access controls and audit logging are precisely the mechanisms that make misuse detectable. Critics answer that a company which markets its ability to integrate data cannot disclaim responsibility for integration, and that audit logs restrain individuals rather than policy.

Financial disclosures show that Stephen Miller, the homeland security adviser directing deportation policy, owns between US$100,000 and US$250,000 of Palantir stock, and that at least ten other members of the administration hold shares, which critics have raised as a conflict of interest. Advocacy organisations including the Alliance for Secure AI have criticised the company's provision of artificial intelligence capability to the administration.

The WikiLeaks proposals

In February 2011 documents taken from the security firm HBGary Federal by the hacking group Anonymous revealed that Palantir, together with HBGary Federal and Berico Technologies, had prepared proposals for the law firm Hunton and Williams, acting for Bank of America and reportedly at the suggestion of the Department of Justice, to undermine WikiLeaks and journalists sympathetic to it.

The proposals contemplated submitting false documents to WikiLeaks in order to discredit it when the forgery was exposed, launching cyberattacks against its infrastructure, and pressuring the journalist Glenn Greenwald on the theory that professionals would choose their careers over their principles.

Palantir apologised, Karp issuing a personal statement, and the engineer involved was placed on leave and later left. The company said the proposals did not reflect its values and had not been authorised. The episode is cited whenever the company's self-description as a defender of civil liberties is raised.

Racial discrimination

The Department of Labor's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs sued Palantir in 2016, alleging that its hiring process discriminated against Asian applicants, with statistical analysis indicating that the probability of the observed outcomes occurring by chance was extremely small, particularly in engineering roles where Asian candidates made up a large share of applicants and a much smaller share of hires. Palantir denied wrongdoing and settled in 2017 for approximately US$1.66 million together with changes to its hiring practices.

Algorithm development and predictive policing

Palantir's police deployments have drawn criticism for opacity. In New Orleans, its work from 2012 was structured as a philanthropic donation through the city's economic development body, which meant it was not subject to the procurement process and was unknown to the city council until reported in 2018. The programme identified individuals likely to be involved in violence, and the city ended it.

In Los Angeles, Palantir supported the LASER and PredPol-adjacent programmes, which the department's own inspector general found in 2019 to have inconsistent data and unclear results, and which were discontinued.

The general criticism of predictive policing applies: systems trained on historical enforcement data reproduce the patterns of that enforcement, so that areas policed heavily in the past are predicted to require heavy policing in future. Palantir's response has been that Gotham is an investigative tool rather than a predictive one, which is accurate for the core product and does not cover every application built on it.

Health data

The NHS Federated Data Platform, described above, is the most prominent health controversy. In the United States, the HHS Protect platform built in 2020 drew objection when the Centers for Disease Control was bypassed for hospital capacity reporting in favour of a system built on Palantir software, which public health researchers argued reduced transparency and interrupted established data series.

Targeting

Palantir's products are used to identify targets for military action, in Ukraine, in Israeli operations and by American forces. Karp has defended this directly, arguing in his 2024 book The Technological Republic, written with Nicholas Zamiska, that Western technologists' reluctance to work on defence is a moral failure rather than a moral achievement, and that the ability to apply force effectively and precisely is what sustains liberal societies.

The objections are of two kinds. The first concerns accountability: when a targeting decision is informed by a system that assembles fragments of evidence into a recommendation, the question of who is responsible for an error becomes harder to answer, and the pressure of operational tempo works against careful review. The second concerns the specific conflicts, particularly Gaza, where the scale of civilian casualties has led campaigners to seek Palantir's exclusion from pension funds, university endowments and government contracts.

Palantir maintains a Council on Advanced Technology and Ethics and publishes civil liberties commitments, and has declined some business, including, it says, work for the Chinese government and certain other states. Critics regard the published commitments as insufficiently binding given that the company decides for itself what they require.

Tax

Palantir has been examined over its corporate tax arrangements, including the routing of international revenue and the very large deferred tax assets arising from its history of losses, which have meant that a highly profitable company pays little cash tax. The arrangements are lawful and are characteristic of technology companies that accumulated losses before becoming profitable.

Applications in detail

Defence and intelligence

In defence work Palantir's software sits between sensors and decisions. A modern military collects far more information than it can process: satellite imagery, full-motion video from uncrewed aircraft, signals intelligence, radar tracks, acoustic sensors, human reporting, open-source material and the contents of captured devices.

Gotham and the Maven system apply computer vision and other models to identify objects in that material, place the results in a shared object model, and present a commander or analyst with a picture that can be interrogated. The phrase used across the industry is shortening the kill chain, meaning the interval between an object being detected and an effect being applied to it, and both Palantir and its customers describe the products in those terms.

The specific applications that have been described publicly include counter-improvised explosive device work in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which patterns in device construction, emplacement and financing were traced to networks; maritime domain awareness, identifying vessels behaving anomalously; logistics and readiness, predicting which equipment will fail; and in Ukraine the identification and prioritisation of targets from combined sensor and civilian reporting.

TITAN extends this to the tactical edge, placing processing capability in vehicles near the front rather than in data centres, which matters because connectivity in contested environments cannot be assumed.

Health

Health systems present exactly the integration problem Palantir addresses: patient records, appointment systems, laboratory systems, imaging, pharmacy, bed management, staffing and finance typically live in separate software bought at different times.

Foundry deployments in the NHS and in American health systems have been used for elective surgery waiting list management, which requires combining referral, capacity, theatre scheduling and staffing data; discharge planning, which requires visibility of social care availability; supply chain, which was the pandemic use case; and population health analysis.

The clinical value is generally accepted by the organisations that have deployed it. The dispute is about governance rather than utility: who decides what data enters the platform, who can query it, whether patients have been told, and what happens to the arrangement when the contract is renewed or transferred.

Industry

Commercial Foundry work concentrates on operations rather than on analytics.

Airbus built Skywise, a platform combining manufacturing, supply chain and in-service aircraft data, initially for the A350 programme and later extended to airline customers, which allowed production issues to be traced to their origins and component failures to be predicted across the fleet. It is the most cited commercial deployment and was used by Palantir for years as its principal reference.

Energy companies use Foundry for well operations, refinery optimisation and emissions tracking. Carmakers use it for supply chain, and the semiconductor shortage of 2021 produced several deployments in which manufacturers needed visibility of component availability several tiers down a supply chain they did not directly know.

Insurers and banks use it for underwriting, fraud and regulatory reporting. Trafigura and other commodity traders use it for position and logistics management.

AIP deployments since 2023 have added a layer in which a user describes what they want in language and the system, constrained by the ontology, proposes the analysis or the action. The applications most often described are in customer service, in procurement, in maintenance scheduling and in the drafting of regulatory documentation.

Selling to governments

Palantir's commercial method in government is distinctive and is part of why it provokes the reaction it does.

Traditional defence procurement runs through a programme of record: a requirement is defined, a competition is held, a contractor builds a system over years, and the system is sustained for decades. The process is slow, produces systems that reflect requirements written long before delivery, and favours incumbents with the administrative capacity to bid.

Palantir's approach has been to enter through the side. It supplies units and agencies directly through small contracts, operational needs statements and pilot funding, establishes itself in operations, and then argues from the resulting dependence that a formal competition should recognise commercial availability. Where the argument has been refused it has litigated.

The approach is effective and has been criticised from two directions. Procurement specialists note that it circumvents processes designed to ensure competition and value, and the awards made to the company without competition, including the British Ministry of Defence contract of December 2025 and several American arrangements, are the specific complaints. The company's answer is that the processes it circumvents were themselves protecting incumbents, which the courts partly accepted in the Army litigation.

The political dimension has grown. Palantir's proximity to the second Trump administration, the share ownership of officials, the company's contribution to the White House ballroom project and the speed with which contracts have been awarded have made the relationship a subject of ordinary political controversy rather than of technical debate.

Sovereignty and the European question

The most significant commercial risk to Palantir outside the United States is not a competitor but a policy.

European governments have grown increasingly uneasy about dependence on American technology for functions touching national security, an unease sharpened by the extraterritorial reach of American law, by the CLOUD Act, and after 2025 by doubts about the reliability of the United States as an ally. The concern is not principally that Palantir would act improperly; it is that a future American administration could compel it to.

The responses have varied. Germany prohibited federal use in 2023 while permitting state police forces to contract. France has kept Palantir in intelligence while funding domestic alternatives and stating an intention to replace it. Spain directed agencies and state-linked companies to avoid the company in July 2026. Italy has confined itself to a minor contract. Denmark and the Netherlands have faced domestic political difficulty over deployments that had not been disclosed. The United Kingdom has been the most willing, which has itself become a political issue.

Palantir's answer is to offer deployments in which the customer controls the infrastructure and the company has no access, and to point out that European alternatives do not exist at comparable capability. Both statements are accurate. Neither addresses the structural objection, which is about jurisdiction rather than about architecture, and the company's very public alignment with American strategic interests makes the objection harder to answer than it would be for a vendor that said nothing.

Media and cultural profile

Palantir was for most of its existence almost entirely absent from public awareness, and its emergence into general visibility has been rapid and hostile.

Investigative journalism has been the principal source of what is known about its work, including reporting by BuzzFeed on its commercial difficulties, by The Intercept and Vice on its immigration and policing work, by Bloomberg Businessweek, whose 2018 profile described the company's policing deployments in detail, by the Washington Post on Immigration OS, by the New York Times on the consolidated data effort, and by Republik, Follow the Money and other European outlets on undisclosed deployments.

Books include The Technological Republic by Karp and Zamiska, which is the company's own statement, and a number of critical treatments of the surveillance technology industry in which Palantir features centrally.

The name itself has become a shorthand in political debate in several countries, generally as a synonym for state data integration, in a way that has outrun most people's knowledge of what the company actually does. Karp has said that he regards the hostility as evidence that the company is engaged in something that matters.

Offices and workforce

Palantir's headquarters moved from Palo Alto to Denver in 2020 and is moving to Miami following the February 2026 announcement. It maintains substantial offices in Washington, New York, Seattle, London, where its British operation is among the larger foreign technology employers, Paris, Munich, Zurich, Bern, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Ottawa and Kyiv.

The workforce of approximately 4,000 is divided between engineering, forward-deployed engineering, and a small commercial organisation. Compensation is high and heavily weighted toward equity, and the company has grown headcount very slowly relative to revenue since 2023.

Recruitment is unusually ideological: the company states its position clearly and expects applicants to have decided about it, which both narrows the pool and reduces the internal dissent that has affected Google and Microsoft over similar work. Employees who have objected, including those who questioned the ICE renewal in 2025, have generally done so through internal channels rather than publicly.

The Palantir Startup Fellowship, begun in 2025, pays participants for a period to develop their own companies, with Palantir taking an interest, and is explicitly an attempt to institutionalise the alumni network that has already produced Anduril, Addepar, Affinity, Glean and others.

Corporate affairs

Leadership

Alex Karp has been chief executive since the founding. He holds a doctorate from Goethe University Frankfurt in neoclassical social theory, practises tai chi and qigong, skis and swims compulsively, lives in a cabin in New Hampshire for part of the year, and gives interviews that move between quarterly results, Hegelian philosophy and direct attacks on named critics. He describes himself as progressive on most domestic questions and has said he votes accordingly, while being among the most forceful advocates of Western military power in the technology industry. The combination is unusual enough that it has been treated as a puzzle by profile writers for two decades; Karp's own explanation is that a belief in liberal society entails a belief in defending it.

Peter Thiel is chairman and the company's originating investor. His political activity, including his support for Donald Trump in 2016 and his funding of Senate campaigns including that of JD Vance, has shaped public perception of the company in ways that Karp has periodically distanced himself from.

Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer, joined in 2006 and was the thirteenth employee. He has written extensively on defence procurement reform and on what he describes as the American defence industrial base's loss of capacity. Ryan Taylor is chief revenue and legal officer. Dave Glazer has been chief financial officer since 2018. Stephen Cohen, a co-founder, was president until 2025.

Joe Lonsdale left operational involvement and founded 8VC. Nathan Gettings left to co-found Robinhood.

The board has included Thiel, Karp, Cohen, Alexander Moore, Alexandra Schiff, Eric Woersching, Lauren Friedman Stat and Spencer Rascoff.

Ownership and voting structure

Palantir has an unusual three-class share structure. Class A shares trade publicly with one vote each; Class B shares carry ten votes; and Class F shares, held by a corporation controlled by Karp, Thiel and Cohen, are constructed so that the three founders together retain approximately 49.999999 per cent of the total voting power regardless of how much of the economic interest they sell.

The mechanism operates by adjusting the votes attached to the Class F shares in response to changes in the other classes. Governance specialists have described it as among the most extreme founder control arrangements in a listed company, and it means that no shareholder vote can be carried against the founders' wishes.

Karp has sold a very large quantity of stock under pre-arranged trading plans since the listing, which has been a recurring subject of comment given the share price's trajectory, and which the voting structure renders irrelevant to control.

Finances

Revenue was approximately US$1.5 billion in 2021, US$1.9 billion in 2022, US$2.2 billion in 2023 and US$2.9 billion in 2024, with net income of US$462 million in 2024 following the company's first profitable year in 2023. Growth accelerated sharply through 2025, with fourth-quarter revenue of US$1.4 billion, up 70 per cent, American commercial revenue up 137 per cent, and total contract value of US$4.3 billion in the quarter.

The government segment has historically been slightly larger than the commercial one; the commercial segment, particularly in the United States, has been growing much faster since AIP.

Stock-based compensation has been very large relative to revenue, which is the principal reason the company's results differ substantially between reported and adjusted measures and a standing objection from analysts.

The valuation is the most argued-about number in enterprise software. At more than US$400 billion against revenue in the low single-digit billions, Palantir trades at a multiple of revenue far above any comparable company, and the bull and bear cases are both straightforward: that the company has a durable and expanding position in government work that competitors cannot easily enter, and that no software business has ever sustained such a multiple.

Culture and employment

Palantir employs approximately 4,000 people, a very small number for its valuation, and has kept headcount deliberately flat while revenue grew, which is the basis of its argument that AIP has made its deployment model scalable.

Its forward-deployed engineers, who work on site with customers for extended periods, are the company's distinctive role and the source of much of its intellectual property, since the products have largely been generalisations of things built for particular customers.

The company recruits heavily from a small number of universities and has run the Palantir Startup Fellowship since 2025, paying participants to work on their own ventures with the company taking an interest, an explicit attempt to build the kind of alumni network that PayPal produced. The Wall Street Journal has described the company as having a pro-America ethos from its inception, and the fellowship's framing has been cited as an example.

Alumni have founded or led a considerable number of companies, including Anduril, Addepar, Affinity, Glean, OpenGov and others, a grouping sometimes called the Palantir mafia by analogy with PayPal's.

Technology

The problem Palantir addresses

The difficulty Palantir was built to solve is not analysis and is not storage. It is that large organisations do not have a single coherent record of what they are doing.

A government department, an army or a manufacturer accumulates systems over decades. Each was bought for a particular purpose, each stores information in its own structure with its own identifiers and its own conventions, and none was designed to be combined with the others. The same person appears in six systems under six identifiers; the same aircraft part has three part numbers; the same event is recorded by four sensors in four formats. The information needed to answer a question exists, and assembling it requires a person to know which systems to consult, to have access to each, to reconcile the identifiers by hand, and to be confident that they have not missed one.

The conventional answer, a data warehouse, copies everything into one schema. This works for reporting and fails for operations, because the copy is stale, because the schema was designed for the questions asked when it was built, and because the reconciliation of identifiers is done once and then decays.

Palantir's answer is to build a persistent model of the objects the organisation deals with, maintained in synchronisation with the source systems, in which the reconciliation is a first-class and continuously maintained artefact rather than a one-off transformation.

The ontology

The ontology is the central concept in Foundry and the company's main intellectual contribution.

It has three parts. Objects are the things the organisation deals with: a patient, an aircraft, a shipment, a claim, a well, a person of interest. Each has properties and is backed by one or more source systems. Links are the relationships between objects: this shipment contains these parts, this patient was seen by this clinician, this vehicle was at this location. Actions are the operations that can be performed: schedule the maintenance, discharge the patient, reroute the shipment. An action is not merely a database write; it is a defined operation with permissions, validation and a record of who performed it and why.

The consequence is that applications, analyses and automations are written against the ontology rather than against the underlying systems. Replacing a source system requires remapping the objects it backs and nothing else. An analyst who understands the business can build something useful without understanding the database landscape. And a language model given access to the ontology, as in AIP, operates on a structure that describes meaning rather than on raw tables.

The cost is that building an ontology is difficult and requires understanding the organisation, which is why Palantir deploys engineers rather than shipping software, and why its gross margins were for many years below those of comparable software companies.

Security model

Palantir's permission model is what allowed it into classified environments and is, by the company's own account, its most under-appreciated feature.

Access control attaches to individual data elements rather than to systems or to tables. A given analyst may see that a record exists without seeing its contents, may see some properties of an object and not others, and may see an aggregate without seeing the individuals composing it. Purpose-based access control allows a rule of the form that a user may see this data only while working on an authorised case. Every access, query and action is logged immutably, and the logs are themselves objects that can be analysed.

The design permits data to be shared between organisations without either surrendering control, which is the basis of the federated architecture used in the NHS platform and in multinational military deployments.

Palantir argues that this constitutes a civil liberties benefit, in that misuse becomes detectable where in most systems it is not. The argument is correct as far as it goes and has been accepted by some data protection authorities and rejected by others, whose position is that a system which makes large-scale integration practical has enabled something that should not have been made practical, whatever its logging.

The forward-deployed engineer

The forward-deployed engineer is Palantir's distinctive organisational invention. These are software engineers, not consultants, who work on a customer's site for months, learn the domain, build what is needed, and feed the generalisable parts back into the product.

The model was adopted because the alternative, shipping a general product and expecting customers to configure it, does not work where the customer cannot articulate the requirement and where the value depends on integration with systems the vendor has never seen. It is expensive, it limits how fast the company can grow, and it was for a decade the principal argument against the company's valuation.

AIP changed the economics, according to the company, because a language model with access to the ontology can perform much of the configuration work that previously required an engineer. The boot camp format, in which a customer's data is used to build working applications within days, is the commercial expression of this, and the flat headcount against rapidly growing revenue since 2023 is the evidence the company offers.

Engineering practice

Palantir's platforms are built largely in Java, TypeScript and Python, run on Kubernetes, and are deployed through Apollo into environments ranging from ordinary commercial clouds to classified networks and disconnected field equipment.

The company has released a number of open-source projects, including Blueprint, a React user interface toolkit that has been widely adopted outside the company, Conjure for API definition, Gradle plugins, and tooling around Kubernetes and Java.

The procurement fight

Palantir's litigation against the United States Army is among the more consequential government contracting cases of the past twenty years and did more than any advocacy to open the defence market to commercial software.

The Army's Distributed Common Ground System was an intelligence data programme begun in the 1990s and developed by traditional contractors at a cost eventually exceeding US$4 billion. Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan found it slow and difficult, and a number of units obtained Palantir instead through operational needs statements, an emergency procurement route. The Army's programme office resisted, on grounds that included interoperability and sustainment and that critics characterised as protection of a programme of record.

The dispute became public in 2012 when a leaked Army assessment and a 2012 letter from Representative Duncan Hunter to the Secretary of Defense described units being denied software that worked. Congressional attention followed, along with reporting on the programme's cost and performance.

In June 2016 Palantir sued the Army in the Court of Federal Claims, arguing that the solicitation for the next increment unlawfully excluded commercial products contrary to the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act, which requires agencies to determine whether commercial items can meet a need before developing something bespoke. The court found for Palantir in November 2016 and the Federal Circuit affirmed in September 2017.

The decision established that the commercial item preference is enforceable, and it is cited routinely by companies attempting to sell technology to the Department of Defense. The Army subsequently awarded Palantir the Army Vantage contract and, in 2025, the Next Generation Command and Control programme.

The broader effect was to make defence technology investable. The wave of companies founded from 2017 onward, and the tens of billions of dollars of venture capital that followed them, rested on a demonstration that a commercial firm could win against incumbents and could enforce its right to compete.

Funding, listing and the market

Private funding

Palantir raised approximately US$3 billion privately across more than a dozen rounds between 2005 and 2020.

In-Q-Tel's investment of about US$2 million in 2005 was small in amount and decisive in effect, since it brought access to the intelligence community and a set of users who could shape the product. Founders Fund, Thiel's firm, participated throughout. Later rounds included Glynn Capital, REV, Tiger Global, Ulu Ventures, the Japanese insurer SOMPO, which invested US$500 million in 2019 alongside a joint venture for the Japanese market, and Fujitsu.

Reported valuations rose from around US$700 million in 2010 to US$9 billion in 2013 and approximately US$20 billion in 2015. Secondary market prices subsequently fell below the last primary round, and several mutual funds marked their holdings down, which contributed to the scepticism that surrounded the company in the late 2010s.

The scepticism had a basis. Palantir was losing money, its gross margins were depressed by the cost of deployed engineers, its commercial customer list was shorter than its marketing implied, and reporting in 2016 and 2017 identified departures and internal frustration. A BuzzFeed investigation in 2017 based on leaked documents described customer losses and missed revenue targets.

The direct listing

Palantir went public on 30 September 2020 by direct listing rather than by underwritten initial public offering, meaning that existing shares began trading without the company raising new capital or engaging banks to allocate them. Spotify and Slack had used the same mechanism.

The S-1 registration statement was unusual in form and content. Karp's introductory letter criticised Silicon Valley's social contribution, stated that the company had chosen to work with the American defence and intelligence establishment when others would not, and said explicitly that Palantir does not work with the Chinese Communist Party. It described the company as having a mission rather than a market.

Shares opened at US$10 and closed the first day at US$9.50, valuing the company at about US$21 billion. The price rose to approximately US$39 in early 2021, fell below US$6 by the end of 2022, and rose very sharply from 2023, passing US$100 in 2025 and giving a market capitalisation above US$400 billion.

The valuation argument

Palantir's valuation has become the most argued-about in software, and the two positions are worth setting out because neither is unreasonable.

The case for it rests on four points. Government contracts, particularly classified ones, are extremely difficult to displace once the software is embedded in operations, which gives the revenue unusual durability. The Army's Next Generation Command and Control award and the Department of Defense consolidation arrangement establish positions measured in decades rather than years. American commercial revenue has been growing at rates above 100 per cent, which suggests the deployment model has genuinely become scalable. And the company is now substantially profitable with flat headcount, which is the specific thing sceptics said could not happen.

The case against rests on arithmetic. A multiple of revenue in the hundreds implies growth sustained for many years at rates that very few companies have achieved, in a market where Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Google and Databricks all sell overlapping capability and where the language model layer that drove the recent growth is available from several suppliers. Stock-based compensation is very large relative to revenue. And a substantial part of the shareholder base is retail, which makes the price sensitive to sentiment in a way institutional ownership does not.

Karp has addressed the question directly and dismissively on several occasions, telling short sellers on an earnings call that they should exit their positions, a style of engagement that is itself part of the phenomenon.

Competition

Palantir competes against several different kinds of organisation, which is one reason its position is difficult to assess.

Defence integrators including Booz Allen Hamilton, Leidos, CACI, SAIC and Northrop Grumman have historically held the government data work, generally on a cost-plus basis with large staffs. Palantir's argument against them is that they sell labour where it sells product, and the argument has been persuasive to the buyers in a way that has damaged the integrators' growth.

Data platform companies including Databricks, Snowflake and the hyperscalers' own services address the same underlying problem with a different model: they sell infrastructure and expect the customer or a partner to do the integration. They are far cheaper, far more widely deployed and considerably less opinionated, and for organisations with capable internal engineering they are usually the better answer. Palantir's differentiation is strongest where the customer cannot do the work itself.

Application vendors including SAP, Oracle and Salesforce own the systems whose data Palantir integrates and have an obvious interest in doing the integration themselves.

Defence technology startups including Anduril, Shield AI and others compete for parts of the same budget, though Palantir partners with several of them and its alumni founded some.

National champions are an increasing factor. France, Germany, Italy and Spain have each expressed a preference for European alternatives on sovereignty grounds, and the Spanish direction in July 2026 to avoid the company, the Italian caution and the German federal prohibition are each expressions of a concern that no technical argument answers.

The COVID-19 work

Palantir's pandemic work is a compact illustration of both its usefulness and the objections to it.

In the United States, the Department of Health and Human Services used Palantir software for HHS Protect, which consolidated hospital capacity, supply and case data. In July 2020 the administration directed hospitals to report capacity data to HHS Protect rather than to the Centers for Disease Control's existing system, which public health researchers objected to on the grounds that it interrupted an established and publicly accessible data series and placed the information behind an arrangement they could not inspect. Some of the data was subsequently made public again.

In England, Palantir built the NHS COVID-19 data store under a contract initially valued at £1, awarded without competition under emergency provisions and extended several times. It supported vaccine distribution, personal protective equipment supply and capacity planning, and by most accounts worked well. The manner of the award, the absence of competition, the extensions and the transition into the much larger Federated Data Platform contract in November 2023 were each challenged, including through litigation brought by openDemocracy and Foxglove, which secured commitments about data use and about future procurement.

The pattern recurs across the company's work: a genuine operational problem solved effectively, under arrangements that were not scrutinised at the time because of urgency, with consequences for the scope of the company's access that persist after the urgency ends.

Ideology

Palantir is unusual among technology companies in having an explicit and publicly argued political position.

Karp's The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, written with Nicholas Zamiska and published in February 2025, sets it out. The argument is that the American technology industry emerged from close collaboration with government, particularly through the Second World War and the Cold War, that it has since retreated into consumer applications and advertising while declining to work on collective problems, and that this retreat is a symptom of a wider loss of belief in the West's own legitimacy. The book calls for the reconstruction of a relationship between technologists and the state, and for a willingness to build things that are useful rather than merely profitable.

The position has been criticised as self-serving, since the company sells to the state, and as a justification for work that the critics regard as harmful whatever its framing. It has also been credited with articulating something the industry subsequently acted on: the number of engineers and investors willing to work on defence increased very substantially between 2018 and 2025, and the argument Karp made when it was unfashionable is now general.

Thiel's contribution to the company's ideological identity is distinct and more contested. His scepticism about democratic institutions, expressed in a 2009 essay stating that he no longer believed freedom and democracy were compatible, and his political funding have been attached to the company by critics in ways Karp has resisted, noting that he and Thiel disagree about most things.

The company's civil liberties framework, its Council on Advanced Technology and Ethics, and its published commitments are the formal expression of its claim to act with restraint. Their weakness, which critics identify consistently, is that the company determines for itself what the commitments require and has not so far declined a contract in a way that cost it materially.

Detailed history

2003 to 2008: building the product

Palantir spent its first three years without a saleable product, which is unusual and was possible only because its funding came from people who did not require quarterly progress.

The engineering team worked with intelligence analysts provided through In-Q-Tel, in a process the company has described as watching people do the job and building what they needed rather than asking what they wanted. The resulting design decisions, particularly the object model and the granular permissions, came from the constraints of that environment: an analyst cannot see everything, cannot copy data out, and must be able to show where a conclusion came from.

The first version of Gotham shipped in 2008. Early deployments were small and intense, with engineers spending months on site, and the company's reputation spread through the analyst community rather than through marketing, which is why its first decade produced almost no public information about what it did.

The Afghanistan and Iraq deployments, supporting counter-improvised explosive device work, were the first at scale and produced the advocacy from field units that led to the Distributed Common Ground System dispute.

2009 to 2015: commercial expansion and the valuation peak

Palantir's entry into commercial work began with financial services, where the analytical problem, tracing connections across transactions and entities, most closely resembles intelligence work.

Notable engagements included work related to the unwinding of the Madoff fraud, mortgage fraud analysis at JPMorgan Chase, and trading surveillance. The bank relationship ended after an internal dispute at JPMorgan over the scope of employee monitoring that the software had been used for, an episode that prefigured later controversies.

The company also worked on disaster response, on human trafficking investigations with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, on epidemiological work, and with a number of non-governmental organisations, engagements it has used prominently in its own communications.

Valuations rose through this period to approximately US$20 billion, and Palantir became one of the most valuable private companies in the world, alongside Uber and Airbnb, without most people being able to say what it sold.

2016 to 2019: the difficult years

The middle period was the company's hardest. Losses continued, customers departed, secondary market prices fell below the last primary round, and investigative reporting described internal frustration and missed targets.

Three things changed the trajectory. The Army litigation, decided in 2016 and affirmed in 2017, opened the defence market. Foundry, released in 2016, gave the company a product that could be sold to commercial customers without the intelligence associations. And Project Maven, taken over in 2019 after Google's withdrawal, established Palantir as the defence technology company willing to do work others would not, which became its identity.

2020 to 2022: listing and the pandemic

The direct listing in September 2020 made the company's finances public for the first time, and they were roughly as sceptics had expected: approximately US$743 million of revenue in 2019 with a net loss of about US$580 million, heavy customer concentration, and very large stock-based compensation.

The pandemic work, described above, expanded the government relationships substantially. The share price rose to a peak in early 2021 on retail enthusiasm and then fell by more than 80 per cent through 2022 as growth slowed and as the market repriced unprofitable technology generally.

2023 to 2026: artificial intelligence and profitability

AIP, launched in April 2023, was the turning point. Palantir's argument, that the constraint on deploying language models in serious organisations is not the model but the governed connection to operational data, matched what enterprises discovered when they tried.

The boot camp sales motion, replacing conventional enterprise sales cycles with short intensive engagements producing working software, shortened the time to a first contract dramatically and was the operational change that made the commercial growth possible.

The company reported its first full profitable year in 2023, joined the S&P 500 in September 2024, moved to Nasdaq in November 2024, and reported revenue growth accelerating through 2025 to 70 per cent year on year in the fourth quarter, with American commercial revenue up 137 per cent.

Government work expanded in parallel, with the Army's Next Generation Command and Control programme, the consolidated Department of Defense arrangement, the NATO Maven acquisition, the British Ministry of Defence contract of December 2025 and the immigration work.

Timeline

• 2003 Founded by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen and Nathan Gettings.
• 2005 In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture arm, invests approximately US$2 million.
• 2008 Gotham ships; deployments begin in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• 2010 Work with financial institutions expands; the New Orleans police arrangement begins.
• 2011 The HBGary leak reveals the WikiLeaks proposals; Palantir apologises.
• 2012 The dispute over the Army's Distributed Common Ground System becomes public.
• 2014 ICE adopts the Investigative Case Management system built on Palantir software.
• 2016 Foundry is released; Palantir sues the Army and wins; the Department of Labor sues over hiring discrimination.
• 2017 The Federal Circuit affirms the Army decision; the discrimination suit settles for about US$1.66 million.
• 2019 Takes over Project Maven after Google's withdrawal; SOMPO invests US$500 million.
• 2020 Direct listing on 30 September; COVID-19 platforms are built for HHS and the NHS; headquarters moves to Denver.
• 2022 Ukraine deployments expand after the invasion; the share price falls more than 80 per cent from its peak.
• 2023 AIP launches in April; the first profitable year; NHS England awards the Federated Data Platform contract worth up to £330 million in November.
• 2024 TITAN contract awarded in March; added to the S&P 500 in September; listing moves to Nasdaq in November; Israeli Ministry of Defense partnership announced in January.
• 2025 Immigration OS developed for ICE; NATO acquires Maven Smart System in March; market capitalisation passes US$400 billion; British Ministry of Defence awards £240 million in December.
• 2026 Headquarters move to Miami announced in February; the Mayor of London blocks a Metropolitan Police contract in May; Spain directs agencies to avoid the company in July.

Reception

Assessments of Palantir divide more sharply than those of any comparable company, and the division is not principally about the technology.

Among its customers the software is generally well regarded, with the qualification that it is expensive and that its value depends heavily on the engineers who deploy it. Independent evaluations, including the Army's own assessments of Palantir against the Distributed Common Ground System, have been favourable where the comparison was made.

Among privacy and civil liberties organisations the company is regarded as among the most consequential threats to privacy in the world, on the argument that it has made practical a degree of integration of state records that was previously prevented by incompetence rather than by law, and that the legal protections were built on the assumption that integration was hard.

Among technologists the position has shifted. Palantir was for many years the company engineers refused to interview with, and it is now among the more sought-after employers for people who want to work on defence, a change that reflects both the industry's altered politics and the company's results.

Among investors the company is a subject of unusually intense retail enthusiasm, with a shareholder base that behaves more like that of a consumer brand than of an enterprise software vendor, and Karp's public engagement with that base is a deliberate part of the phenomenon.

The one point on which most observers agree is that Palantir has been consistent. It has said since 2003 that it intended to build software for Western governments and their security agencies, it has not pretended to be doing something else, and it has accepted the consequences of saying so.

Influence

Palantir's influence on the technology industry has been larger than its revenue.

It established that a software company could sell to defence and intelligence agencies as a product company rather than as a contractor, at a time when that market was closed to anyone without decades of relationship and a cost-plus accounting department. The argument that the Pentagon should buy commercial software rather than commission bespoke systems, which Palantir made through litigation as well as through advocacy, has changed procurement practice: the company sued the Army in 2016 over the Distributed Common Ground System and won, the Court of Federal Claims holding that the Army had failed to consider commercial alternatives as required by law, and the decision has been cited repeatedly since.

The wave of defence technology companies founded after 2017, including Anduril, Shield AI, Saronic, Castelion and others, and the venture capital that funds them, proceeds directly from the demonstration that the market was enterable. Thiel and Palantir alumni are central to that wave.

The company has also shaped how large organisations think about data integration. The ontology concept, and the broader argument that the difficulty is not analysis but the construction of a coherent model of an organisation's activity, has been adopted by competitors and by the data platform industry generally.

Assessment

Palantir is the clearest case in contemporary technology of a company whose capability and whose controversy are the same thing.

Its software does what it says: it takes information held in incompatible systems and makes it usable together, with fine-grained permissions and a complete audit trail. For a hospital managing discharges, an aircraft manufacturer tracing a supply chain or an army locating a missile launcher, this is straightforwardly valuable, and the difficulty of doing it is the reason the company exists twenty-three years after its founding in a market that has attracted many attempts.

The same capability applied to a population is a surveillance apparatus, and the company's principal customers are states. Palantir's answer, consistently given, is that the alternative to good tools is not no tools but bad ones, that its access controls and logging are a genuine improvement on the spreadsheets and unlogged database queries they replace, and that democratic governments are entitled to the best available technology. The answer is not empty. It also does not address the case where the policy itself is the objection, which is what the immigration work has made concrete: better software for deportation produces more deportations, and the audit log records them accurately.

The company has been unusually willing to state its position rather than to obscure it, which distinguishes it from competitors who do similar work quietly, and which is why it absorbs criticism that is in part directed at an industry. Karp's argument, that Silicon Valley spent two decades building advertising and consumer applications while declining to work on defence, and that this was a failure of seriousness rather than of ethics, has been substantially vindicated by the industry's subsequent reversal.

What remains genuinely open is whether the valuation reflects a durable position or an enthusiasm, and whether a company with this degree of access to state systems, controlled permanently by three founders through a voting structure no shareholder can override, is an arrangement that democracies should accept. Neither question will be settled by the quality of the software, which is not in doubt.

Legal and regulatory framework

Palantir operates within several distinct legal regimes, and its exposure differs sharply by jurisdiction.

United States. Federal privacy law is sectoral rather than general: the Privacy Act of 1974 restricts how federal agencies handle records about individuals and limits matching programmes between agencies, HIPAA governs health information, the Fair Credit Reporting Act governs certain commercial data, and the Fourth Amendment restricts searches. What none of these does comprehensively is restrict the aggregation of information that agencies already hold lawfully, which is the activity Palantir's software makes practical. The third-party doctrine, under which information voluntarily given to a company generally has no constitutional protection, further widens the space, though Carpenter v. United States (2018) began to narrow it for location data.

The consequence is that much of what critics object to is lawful, and the objection is properly directed at the law rather than at the vendor, a point Palantir makes and which does not fully answer the criticism that the company lobbied for and profited from the arrangement.

European Union. The General Data Protection Regulation and the Law Enforcement Directive impose purpose limitation, data minimisation and a requirement of legal basis, all of which constrain the kind of general integration Palantir enables. The German Federal Constitutional Court's February 2023 decision, striking down the Hesse and Hamburg automated analysis provisions because they permitted the processing of data about people who were not suspects, is the clearest judicial statement of the limit. The EU Artificial Intelligence Act, applying from 2025 and 2026, classifies predictive policing and certain biometric applications as prohibited or high risk, with further consequences for deployments.

United Kingdom. The Data Protection Act 2018 and the UK GDPR apply, with the National Data Guardian and the Information Commissioner's Office exercising oversight in health. The Federated Data Platform was the subject of a data protection impact assessment and of litigation that produced commitments on scope, and the general practitioner data question that arose in September 2026 falls within a separate and long-contested framework governing primary care records.

Export control. Palantir's products are subject to American export control, and its refusal to sell to certain governments is partly a matter of choice and partly of law.

Responses to criticism

Palantir has developed a set of standing answers to the objections made against it, and they are worth setting out because they are the terms in which the argument is actually conducted.

"We build tools, customers decide policy." The company says it supplies software and that what a democratically accountable government does with it is a matter for that government and its voters. The answer is formally correct and is weakened by the company's own marketing, which sells specific outcomes rather than general capability, and by Immigration OS, which was built for a defined purpose.

"The alternative is worse." Palantir argues that agencies will integrate data regardless, and that they will do it by exporting spreadsheets and emailing them, with no permissions, no logging and no provenance. This is a strong argument on the facts and is the main reason some data protection authorities have accepted deployments. It does not answer the case where integration itself is the objection.

"Our access controls protect civil liberties." The granular permissions and immutable audit logs are real and are better than what they replace. The limit, identified consistently by critics, is that they constrain individual misconduct and not institutional policy: a log that faithfully records a lawful mass deportation records it faithfully.

"We decline business others accept." The company states that it does not work with the Chinese government and has declined other engagements. Critics note that these refusals align with American strategic interest and that no refusal has been shown to have cost the company materially.

"We are transparent about what we are." This is the strongest of the answers. Palantir has said since its founding what it intends to do, has not disguised it, and has taken the resulting reputational cost rather than diffusing it, which distinguishes it from a number of companies doing comparable work under blander descriptions.

Comparisons

Palantir is frequently compared to organisations it does not much resemble, and the comparisons are worth disentangling.

It is not a data broker. Companies such as Acxiom, LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Thomson Reuters CLEAR collect and sell personal information; Palantir sells software that operates on data the customer already has, and does not itself hold or trade personal information about the public. Several of its deployments ingest data purchased from brokers, which is the point at which the distinction matters less than it sounds.

It is not NSO Group or a comparable vendor of intrusion tools. Palantir does not sell means of obtaining information covertly; it sells means of organising information obtained by other means.

It is not principally a machine learning company, though it has become one at the margins. Its core products are data integration and workflow software, and for most of its history the analysis they supported was performed by people.

The closest analogues are the large systems integrators, from which it differs by selling a product rather than labour, and the modern data platform companies, from which it differs by taking responsibility for the integration rather than providing the infrastructure for a customer to do it.

Financial summary

Year	Revenue	Net income
2019	approx. US$743 million	approx. −US$580 million
2020	approx. US$1.09 billion	approx. −US$1.17 billion
2021	approx. US$1.54 billion	approx. −US$520 million
2022	approx. US$1.91 billion	approx. −US$374 million
2023	approx. US$2.23 billion	approx. US$210 million
2024	approx. US$2.87 billion	approx. US$462 million

The large losses of 2020 and 2021 were driven principally by stock-based compensation recognised on the direct listing rather than by operating cash outflow, and the company's cash position was strong throughout.

Revenue is reported in four segments by customer type and geography: United States government, United States commercial, international government and international commercial. The American commercial segment, long the weakest, has been the fastest growing since 2023 and is the basis of the argument that the company has escaped its dependence on government work.

Assessment of the record

Three judgements can be made about Palantir with reasonable confidence after twenty-three years.

The first is that the technical thesis was correct. The difficulty in making large organisations use their own information is integration rather than analysis, the difficulty is much greater than it appears, and a company that solves it for a customer acquires a position that is extremely hard to dislodge. Competitors approaching the same problem with cheaper and more general tools have taken the easier half of the market and have not taken the harder half.

The second is that the commercial thesis took far longer to prove than its backers expected and was rescued by something they did not foresee. For fifteen years the objection to Palantir was that its model required expensive engineers and therefore could not scale. The objection was correct until language models made much of that work automatable, at which point a business that had been criticised for spending a decade building structured models of its customers' operations discovered that structured models of operations were exactly what the new technology required.

The third is that the political thesis, which is Karp's, has been vindicated in its narrow form and remains contested in its broad one. The narrow claim, that Western technology companies should be willing to work on defence, has gone from heretical to consensus in seven years. The broad claim, that a company supplying the security apparatus of states is thereby serving liberal society, depends entirely on what those states do, and the company has bound its answer to that question to the conduct of particular governments over which it exercises no control and from which it has not so far distanced itself.

See also

• Alex Karp
• Peter Thiel
• Anduril
• Mass surveillance
• Big data
• PayPal