Palantír

• 1. Introduction

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  Palantir Technologies takes its name from a "seeing stone" in J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium: a crystal orb through which distant events could be observed, and power exercised. Peter Thiel chose that name deliberately in 2003, when he and four co-founders set up a company whose software would do exactly that: look across enormous pools of data and surface patterns invisible to any single analyst. Two decades later, Palantir sits at the center of some of the most contested questions in modern life. Who controls data about ordinary people? What happens when private software becomes the backbone of a government's ability to deport, surveil, and target? And how does a company that was barely funded in its first year become, in 2025, valued at more than $400 billion by the market, while The Economist calls it possibly "the most over-valued firm of all time"?

  The story of how Palantir got from a Palo Alto startup to a fixture in the war rooms of a dozen governments passes through a CIA venture capital fund, a White House press conference with Vice President Biden, the front lines of Ukraine, and the corridors of NHS England. The questions it raises have no easy answers, which is perhaps why Palantir keeps finding new customers while accumulating new critics.

• 2. From PayPal to the Pentagon

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  In 2004, Thiel hired Alex Karp, a former colleague from Stanford Law School, as the chief executive of the company he had just named. Karp would prove to be an unusual choice: a philosopher who completed his doctorate in Frankfurt rather than an engineer or a venture capitalist. The two men began building software that others would find applications for, which is how multiple accounts of Palantir's founding describe its early trajectory.

  The initial $30 million cost was largely covered by Thiel and his venture fund, with little interest from outside investors. One notable exception was In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA, which put in roughly $2 million. That connection would prove consequential. According to reporting by VentureBeat in 2009, most of the intelligence community learned about Palantir by word of mouth within a few years of its founding.

  For two years, the company revised its technology continuously based on feedback from intelligence analysts introduced to the team through In-Q-Tel. Early projects ranged from a study of subprime lenders for the Center for Public Integrity to analyses of Somali piracy and Hezbollah. Palantir's central argument in those years was that artificial intelligence alone could not defeat an adaptive adversary. Human analysts, working with data drawn from many sources at once, were the key. The company called this approach intelligence augmentation.

  Palantir maintained founder control throughout its early funding rounds by declining to offer board seats to investors, even In-Q-Tel. Oakhouse Partners led a $7.5 million Series A in June 2006, and a $10.5 million Series B followed in November 2006. The company was operating well below the radar of the broader technology press, but its customer list was quietly expanding inside the US government.

• 3. Connecting the Silos

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  On the 18th of June 2010, Vice President Joe Biden and Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag held a press conference at the White House. The subject was fraud detection in the federal stimulus program. Biden credited Palantir with supporting the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board's efforts, citing specific cases the system had identified, and announced that the capability would spread to Medicare and Medicaid.

  That public endorsement pointed to the specific problem Palantir had solved. Before its software arrived, the databases used by agencies like the CIA and FBI were siloed: analysts had to search each one individually. A 2015 TechCrunch report, drawing on leaked documents, described the change directly: "The U.S. spy agencies also employed Palantir to connect databases across departments. Before this, most of the databases used by the CIA and FBI were siloed, forcing users to search each database individually. Now everything is linked together using Palantir."

  By 2013, a document leaked to TechCrunch revealed that Palantir's clients included at least 12 groups within the US government: the CIA, the DHS, the NSA, the FBI, the CDC, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, the United States Military Academy, the Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Organization, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

  In Afghanistan, US military intelligence used Palantir's product to improve its ability to predict locations of improvised explosive devices. Field practitioners reported that its analytical capabilities outperformed the Army's official system, the Distributed Common Ground System. Congressman Duncan D. Hunter complained in 2012 about Department of Defense obstacles to its wider use. Meanwhile, Palantir's relationship with individual agencies was sometimes more complicated than the company's reputation suggested: by 2017, BuzzFeed News reported that the NSA had been resistant because it had its own talent base and focused on signals intelligence rather than the human intelligence work where Palantir's software excelled. The CIA had even tried to cancel its Palantir contract, frustrated by the publicity associating the two organizations.

• 4. The Valuation Puzzle

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  In December 2013, Palantir raised around $450 million from private funders, which pushed its valuation to $9 billion. Forbes described it as among Silicon Valley's most valuable private technology companies. CEO Karp had announced that same year that the company would not pursue an IPO, saying going public would make "running a company like ours very difficult."

  The valuation kept climbing: $15 billion in November 2014, then $20 billion by the end of 2015 after an $880 million funding round. In 2018, Morgan Stanley valued the company at $6 billion, a significant markdown. By October 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported Palantir was considering a public offering following a $41 billion valuation.

  When Palantir did go public in September 2020, it did so through a direct offering on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker PLTR rather than a traditional IPO. The company had not made a profit before that moment. It reported its first quarter of positive net income under non-GAAP metrics in the fourth quarter of 2022, and its first quarter of positive GAAP net income in the first quarter of 2023, totaling $31 million. The 20-year stretch of losses before that milestone is a defining fact about the company's financial history.

  On the 6th of September 2024, S&P Global announced Palantir would be added to the S&P 500, and its share price rose 14% the following trading day. By 2025, Fortune noted that Palantir's market capitalization exceeded $400 billion, which would rank it among the world's most valuable companies, yet its revenues would fail to meet the Fortune 500 threshold of $50 billion annually. The Economist called it possibly "the most over-valued firm of all time," with a market value of $430 billion representing over 600 times its 2024 earnings. As of November 2025, its shares were the most expensive on the S&P 500 relative to expected forward annual sales, at 85 times.

• 5. Products Built for Hard Targets

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  Palantir Gotham, released in 2008, was built for defense and intelligence work. It supports geospatial analysis, alerts, and prediction, and foreign customers include the Ukrainian military. In a December 2022 report, The Times described how Palantir's AI had allowed Ukraine to increase the accuracy, speed, and deadliness of its artillery strikes. Ukraine's prosecutor general's office also planned to use the software to document alleged Russian war crimes.

  In April 2023, Palantir launched the Artificial Intelligence Platform, or AIP, integrating large language models into privately operated networks. The company demonstrated its use in a military scenario, where an operator could deploy operations and receive responses through an AI chatbot. Karp specified that the product would not let AI independently carry out targeting operations; human oversight would be required. AIP also comes with five-day onboarding boot camps for prospective clients and an annual conference called AIPCon.

  Palantir's TITAN system, developed with internal research and development funding alongside Anduril Industries and Northrop Grumman, is a mobile command vehicle equipped with AI and analytics software for field intelligence. The company is under contract to deliver 10 units to the US Army, and claims TITAN can improve customers' ability to conduct long-range precision strikes.

  A product called MetaConstellation supports a satellite network that deploys AI models. Users can request information about specific locations, and the service dispatches the resources needed. The United States Northern Command is among its customers. Palantir also offers Skykit, a portable toolbox for intelligence operations in adverse environments, including a backpack variant and a maritime variant. The Ukrainian military began receiving Skykit units in 2023. In November 2025, Bedfordshire police in the UK used Palantir's Nectar product to read and translate over 100,000 text messages in a criminal investigation, converting them from Romanian to English to support a conviction.

• 6. Health Data and the NHS Battle

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  Palantir Foundry's prominence in healthcare grew substantially through the COVID-19 pandemic. By April 2020, several countries had used Palantir's technology to track contagion. Palantir also built Tiberius, a software system for vaccine allocation used in the United States. Foundry was deployed within the National COVID Cohort Collaborative, a federated network of electronic health records, and research using the platform won the NIH/FASEB Dataworks Grand Prize.

  In 2020, NHS England awarded Palantir an emergency, non-competitive contract worth more than £23.5 million to mine COVID-19 patient data and consolidate government databases. That the contract was awarded without competition drew criticism and a pledge from the NHS to conduct an open procurement for any future data contract. NHS England also used Foundry for administering the UK Homes for Ukraine program.

  The procurement of a broader Federated Data Platform connecting patient data across England became the central battleground. The contract was described internally as a "must win" for Palantir. In November 2023, NHS England awarded Palantir a seven-year contract valued at £330 million to design and operate that platform. NHS England originally published the contract with more than 70% of its pages redacted; legal action resulted in partial disclosure. The British Medical Association, The Doctors' Association UK, and cybersecurity professionals criticized the deal, citing concerns about patient privacy, procurement transparency, and Palantir's commercial contracts with the Israel Defense Forces. In April 2024, medical professionals picketed outside NHS England headquarters demanding the contract's cancellation.

  Palantir UK is headed by Louis Mosley, grandson of British fascist leader Oswald Mosley, who was quoted internally as describing the company's strategy for entering the British health industry as "buy our way in" by acquiring smaller rivals with existing NHS relationships. In 2022, Palantir recruited NHS England's former AI chief, Indra Joshi, and announced plans to increase its UK team by 250 people.

• 7. Immigration, Surveillance, and Civil Liberties

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  In 2014, ICE awarded Palantir a $41 million contract to build and maintain an intelligence system called Investigative Case Management to track personal and criminal records of legal and illegal immigrants. The system reached its final operational capacity under the first Trump administration in September 2017. Documents obtained by The Intercept and Mijente in 2017 showed that ICE considered the ICM software "mission critical" and that a joint operation that year used the database to arrest and possibly deport family members of undocumented children caught at the border.

  In August 2019, a raid on food-processing plants in Mississippi led by HSI and using the FALCON system resulted in the arrest of nearly 700 people. A few months later, Karp acknowledged to CNBC that Palantir's blanket denials about its role in deportations had been misleading. He nonetheless renewed the ICE contract in 2019 for $50 million over three years.

  In April 2025, Palantir signed a new $30 million contract with ICE for a platform called ImmigrationOS, the Immigration Lifecycle Operating System, designed to track undocumented immigrants and expedite their deportation. The project was renewed in September 2025. In an October 2025 interview with The New York Times, Palantir's chief technology officer Shyam Sankar described what the system tracked: border encounters, asylum applications, and applications for benefits. Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham wrote that Palantir was "building the infrastructure of the police state."

  The second Trump administration compounded scrutiny. Financial disclosures showed Stephen Miller, the homeland security advisor overseeing deportation efforts, owned between $100,000 and $250,000 of Palantir stock. At least 10 other Trump administration members held Palantir shares. In February 2025, The New York Times reported that Trump and Palantir were compiling a master list of personal information on every American, a claim Palantir denies. A separate 2016 lawsuit brought by the Department of Labor alleged that Palantir had discriminated against Asian job applicants; the company settled in April 2017 for $1.7 million without admitting wrongdoing.

• 8. Power, Founders, and What Comes Next

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  Palantir went public with an unusual voting structure. The founders created Class F shares, totaling 1,005,000, held equally by Thiel, Karp, and Cohen through a Founder Voting Trust. Those shares guarantee the three founders a 49.99% voting interest regardless of how many other shares the company issues or how many they hold. The founders described this as protection against foreign takeover bids and pressure from bad actors. Bloomberg wrote in 2025 that the arrangement also insulates "an increasingly powerful company from a measure of accountability offered by the public markets."

  For fiscal year 2024, Palantir reported earnings of $462 million on annual revenue of $2.9 billion. In 2025, revenue reached $4.6 billion with net income of $1.1 billion. For Q4 2025, revenue was $1.4 billion, a 70% increase year-over-year, driven by enterprise adoption of AIP; US commercial revenue rose 137% in that quarter to $507 million. An Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy report found that despite reporting roughly $1.5 billion in domestic income in 2025, Palantir paid no US federal income tax, primarily because of provisions allowing immediate deduction of research and development expenses.

  Palantir's footprint has spread well beyond its original defense roots. The company has partnerships with Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics. It collaborates with Anthropic and Amazon Web Services to provide Claude AI models to US intelligence and defense agencies. In Korea, Samsung partnered with Palantir in 2025 to improve chip yield and quality. On the 31st of July 2025, the US Army awarded Palantir an enterprise agreement valued at up to $10 billion over 10 years, consolidating 75 previously separate contracts.

  In February 2026, Palantir announced plans to move its headquarters from Denver back to Miami. Meanwhile, in April 2026, the company published a manifesto co-authored by Karp that frames AI weapons proliferation using Cold War deterrence logic. The claim in that manifesto that "No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one" drew criticism from academics and analysts. The seeing stone, it turns out, is also a mirror, and what it reflects depends entirely on who is holding it.