Palantir Technologies

Palantir Technologies was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel , Alex Karp , Joe Lonsdale , Stephen Cohen, and Nathan Gettings, with early backing from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture arm. Karp, a philosophy PhD from Frankfurt with no prior software background, has run the company as chief executive ever since; Thiel chairs the board. The headquarters moved from Palo Alto to Denver in 2020 and on to Miami, Florida, where it sits today. Palantir went public on the NYSE in September 2020 through a direct listing and now trades on Nasdaq under the ticker PLTR, with a market capitalisation that has spent much of 2024 and 2025 above $200 billion.

The company sells four products. Gotham is the original platform, built for intelligence analysts and military operators to fuse signals, geospatial feeds, biometric records, and human-source reporting into a single investigative graph. Foundry serves commercial and civil-government customers — manufacturers, hospitals, ministries — with much of the same data-integration plumbing repackaged for non-classified work. Apollo is the continuous-deployment layer that pushes both Gotham and Foundry into customer environments, including air-gapped and classified networks where ordinary CI/CD tools cannot reach. AIP, the Artificial Intelligence Platform launched in 2023, wraps large language models with role-based access controls and audit trails so that defence and intelligence customers can use generative AI against their own data without leaking it to the model provider.

Palantir’s customer list reads as a map of the Western security state. The US Army awarded it the $800 million TITAN ground-station contract in March 2024, the first major prime-contractor win for a Silicon Valley software firm in that programme class. The company holds long-running deals with US Special Operations Command, the Department of Homeland Security’s ICE, the FBI, the CDC, and the UK’s NHS, where its £330 million Federated Data Platform contract drew sustained protest from clinicians and privacy groups. In Ukraine, Karp has said publicly that Palantir software is “responsible for most of the targeting” carried out by Ukrainian forces; the company opened a Kyiv office in 2022 and offered its tools to the government for free in the opening weeks of the war. Israel has been a customer of Gotham for years, and the relationship deepened after October 2023.

Revenue reached $2.87 billion in 2024, up roughly 29 percent year on year, with US commercial growth outpacing the historically dominant government segment for the first time. Headcount sits around 4,400, modest for a firm of its valuation, a deliberate choice Karp frames as a hedge against the bloat he sees at larger software vendors.

The company attracts more public criticism than any of its peers. Employee walkouts at Amazon and Google over similar contracts have no analogue at Palantir, where staff are screened for ideological alignment with the firm’s pro-defence stance. Karp’s combative public appearances — defending lethal targeting work, denouncing what he calls the “woke” tech industry, predicting the decline of European sovereignty without rearmament — keep the company in the news between earnings calls. For a software vendor, Palantir behaves unusually like a political project, and that is the point.