Palantir Technologies

Overview

Before Palantir Technologies became a public-market emblem of AI-driven defense software, it was a startup that Silicon Valley’s venture establishment would not fund. In 2004, chief executive Alex Karp pitched Sequoia Capital — whose best-known partner, Michael Moritz, sat on PayPal’s board alongside co-founder Peter Thiel — and, by Karp’s own account, Moritz spent most of the meeting doodling in his notepad (Fast Company). The money came instead from the Central Intelligence Agency’s venture arm: In-Q-Tel invested $1.25 million for equity — and, unusually, took no board seat — after which Thiel put up another $2.84 million (Fast Company).

Palantir was co-founded by Thiel in 2004, and its founding idea was to adapt PayPal’s fraud-fighting technology to counterterrorism in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks (Britannica). At PayPal, engineers had built a system called IGOR that flagged suspicious transactions for human review — a hybrid of machine detection and analyst judgment that, in Fast Company’s telling, “basically saved PayPal’s business” (Fast Company). Thiel’s proposition was that the same approach could help the U.S. government in the war on terrorism (Fast Company).

What the organization is known for

Palantir is best known as a data-analytics firm whose core customers have been governments — intelligence agencies, militaries, and law-enforcement bodies — with a later push into commercial clients (Britannica; The Motley Fool). Financially, it is known for one of the longest roads to profitability in enterprise software: it posted its first-ever profit under generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) only in the fourth quarter of 2022 — revenue of $509 million, up 18% year over year, with earnings of $0.01 per share — beating analyst expectations and arriving years ahead of its own stated target of GAAP profitability by 2025 (The Motley Fool). Government work drove that quarter: government revenue rose 23% to $293 million while commercial revenue grew 11% to $215 million, and the customer count jumped 55% to 367 (The Motley Fool).

Products and services

Gotham, Palantir’s first software platform, grew directly out of the CIA deployment: it is aimed at intelligence and defense analysis, helping analysts find patterns and connections across large datasets (Fast Company). At Karp’s insistence, Gotham was built with privacy guardrails unusual for surveillance-adjacent software — users could access only information they were authorized to view, and the platform generated an audit trail flagging attempts to reach off-limits material (Fast Company).

Named deployments established from the sources read include the United Kingdom’s NHS Federated Data Platform — a seven-year contract worth up to £330 million awarded to a Palantir-led group in 2023, under which the data remains under NHS control and Palantir may not commercialize it, use it for its own purposes, or train AI models on it — and NATO’s Maven Smart System, acquired in March 2025 for Allied Command Operations to support intelligence fusion, targeting, battlespace awareness, and planning (Techstrong IT).

Ownership, founders and leadership

Peter Thiel co-founded Palantir in 2004 and supplied early capital beyond the In-Q-Tel round (Britannica; Fast Company). Alex Karp has served as chief executive since the company’s early years (Fast Company). Early collaborators included co-founder Stephen Cohen, then 22, and ex-PayPal engineer Nathan Gettings, who together built the demo that won over In-Q-Tel (Fast Company).

What had sold In-Q-Tel’s chief executive, Gilman Louie, was working style as much as technology: when he stressed that the interface had to make sense to analysts, the Palantir team “got out of sales mode and immediately switched into engineering solving mode” in front of him (Fast Company). Karp later said the investment’s most valuable component was not the money but the access — engineers embedded directly with the CIA analysts who were the intended customers. Cohen and engineer Aki Jain began traveling biweekly from Palo Alto to CIA headquarters in Langley in 2005, making the trip roughly 200 times; CIA analysts nicknamed Cohen “Two Weeks” (Fast Company). The practice — stationing software engineers at the customer’s site — became Palantir’s signature “forward-deployed engineer” model (Fast Company).

Funding and acquisitions

Palantir’s earliest outside capital was the CIA venture arm’s $1.25 million equity investment, followed by Thiel’s additional $2.84 million — with In-Q-Tel taking no board seat, which Fast Company notes was unusual and worked to the company’s advantage as later money arrived (Fast Company). Until 2022, the company had relied on “adjusted” profitability metrics while posting a long streak of net losses, which gave some investors pause (The Motley Fool). No acquisitions are asserted in this profile; none were verified from sources read in full.

Regulation, licenses and compliance record

Palantir’s government work has drawn sustained organized opposition. In September 2026, more than 120 European trade unions and civil-society organizations — 125 signatories from 30 countries, including the European Federation of Public Service Unions, Corporate Europe Observatory, and Global Justice Now — published an open letter urging governments and the European Commission to cancel existing Palantir public-sector contracts and bar the company from future deals, citing vendor dependence, data governance, and procurement concerns (Techstrong IT). Palantir’s stated position is that it is not a surveillance company: customers retain control of their data, and the company says it does not own, collect, or sell customers’ personal data (Techstrong IT).

U.S. federal spending records show Immigration and Customs Enforcement awarded Palantir an $86.3 million order in May to modernize its Enforcement Case Management System, and Palantir says its work with Israel’s Ministry of Defense began after the October 7, 2023 attacks, with a strategic partnership disclosed in early 2024 (Techstrong IT). From the company’s earliest days, the NYPD’s intelligence unit began a pilot program with its software in 2007, extending its counterterrorism work into domestic law enforcement (Fast Company).

Timeline

• 2004 — Peter Thiel co-founds Palantir; Karp’s Sequoia pitch is rejected while In-Q-Tel invests $1.25M and Thiel adds $2.84M (Britannica; Fast Company)
• 2005 — Embedded-engineer program begins: Cohen and Jain start biweekly Palo Alto–Langley trips (Fast Company)
• 2007 — NYPD intelligence-unit pilot begins (Fast Company)
• 2022 — First GAAP-profitable quarter (Q4): $509M revenue, $0.01 EPS (The Motley Fool)
• 2023 — NHS England awards the seven-year, up-to-£330M Federated Data Platform contract (Techstrong IT)
• 2025 — NATO acquires Maven Smart System NATO for Allied Command Operations (Techstrong IT)
• 2026 — 125-organization European coalition calls for cancellation of Palantir public-sector contracts (Techstrong IT)

Competitors and partners

Documented partners and customers include the CIA (via In-Q-Tel’s investment and the embedded-engineer deployment), the NYPD, NHS England, NATO, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Israel’s Ministry of Defense (Fast Company; Techstrong IT). Named competitors were not established from the sources read for this profile.

What this profile does not claim

• It does not assert a public-listing date or mechanism; the widely reported September 2020 direct listing was not verified from a source read in full.
• It follows Britannica in dating the co-founding to 2004; readers comparing sources should note this profile dates the founding to 2004 throughout.
• It does not describe Foundry, Apollo, or AIP, whose details were not verified from fully-read sources.
• It does not assert valuation, market-capitalization, or share-price figures, which move constantly and were not the subject of this research.
• It does not adjudicate the contested claims around Palantir’s immigration-enforcement or military work beyond the contract facts and the company’s stated position recorded above.
• This profile covers Palantir Technologies, the software company — not other uses of the name.