Palantir

Palantir Technologies Inc. is an American publicly traded company that develops data integration and analytics platforms enabling government agencies, militaries, and corporations to combine and analyze data from multiple sources. Its flagship products—Gotham (for intelligence and defense) and Foundry (for commercial and civil use)—connect previously siloed databases to support intelligence operations, counterterrorism analysis, law enforcement, and enterprise analytics. Headquartered in Miami, Florida, it was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Stephen Cohen, Joe Lonsdale, Alex Karp, and Nathan Gettings. Palantir's customer base includes federal agencies, state and local governments, international organizations, and also private companies. The company has four main operating systems: Palantir Gotham, Palantir Foundry, Palantir Apollo, and Palantir AIP. Palantir Gotham is an intelligence tool used by militaries and counter-terrorism analysts, including the United States Intelligence Community (USIC) and United States Department of Defense. Multiple police departments have used Gotham for crime analysis. Civil liberties organizations including the ACLU have criticized this use as predictive policing. CEO Alex Karp disputes this characterization, arguing the system is an analytical tool requiring human judgment rather than an autonomous predictive system that independently forecasts criminal activity. Its software as a service (SaaS) is one of five offerings the U.S. Department of Defense authorized for Mission Critical National Security Systems (IL5). Palantir has been used for data integration and analysis by corporate clients such as Morgan Stanley, Merck KGaA, Airbus, Wejo, Lilium, PG&E and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. Palantir Apollo is a platform to facilitate continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) across all environments. Palantir reported its first quarter of positive net income under non-GAAP metrics in Q4 2022 and its first quarter of positive GAAP net income in Q1 2023, totaling $31 million, reaching profitability after about 20 years since its founding. Palantir has been criticized for its involvement in expanding government surveillance through artificial intelligence and facial recognition technologies. Critics have raised concerns about its contracts with the Trump administration, which enable deportations of undocumented immigrants and the aggregation of sensitive data on Americans. Supporters say that Palantir does not collect, store, or sell data itself but rather provides software that helps clients analyze data they already have access to, while clients retain control and rights over their own information.