Palantir Technologies – A Software Company Whose Products Are Used For Counter-Terrorism Analytics.
Based in America, Palantir Technologies is a software company which is specializing in big data analytics. Peter Thiel, Nathan Gettings, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, and Alex Karp founded the company in 2003. Currently, the headquarters of the company is based in Denver, Colorado, and Alex Karp is the present CEO. Palantir is famous around the world for three main projects, namely, Palantir Gotham, Palantir Metropolis, and Palantir Foundry.
United States Intelligence Community and United States Department of Defense use Palantir Gotham for counter-terrorism analysis. These main three products of Palantir are used by many big clients such as Morgan Stanley, Airbus, Fiat Chrysler, etc. Palantir’s customer base has expanded to healthcare industries and it also works closely with the local and state government.
Early Years of Palantir Technologies
Peter Thiel originally founded the company in 2003 with a single mission to combat terrorism by developing suitable software. After a year, Peter bankrolled a prototype creation and built a team that included a PayPal engineer, two students from Stanford University, and one of his former colleagues from Stanford Law School. Peter made this former colleague (Alex Karp) CEO of the company.
When the company was founded it was headquartered in Palo Alto, California. In the initial days, the company struggled to land investors. Firms like Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins turned them down and demoralized them by saying it was going to be an epic fail. After trying for some time, they received an initial investment of $2 million from In-Q-Tel and then Thiel invested $30 million from his pocket. After receiving the funding, it took three years for Palantir to complete its product. Thiel realized that only artificial intelligence was not enough to build what he was aiming for so he hired analysts who can explore data from multiple sources.
The Success of Palantir Technologies
The company made breakthroughs in 2009 and 2010 when Information Warfare Monitor used the technology of Palantir to uncover the GhostNet and the Shadow Network. Both of them were Chinese espionage that targeted the compromise of several computer networks across 103 countries including Dalai Lama’s office. The Shadow Network hacked into the Indian security system and defense apparatus.
In 2010, Palantir started a joint venture with Thompson Reuters to sell a quantitative analysis tool, QA Studio. The same year, Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board fought fraud by deploying Palantir software. After this success, Biden announced at the White House that further the company’s software will be incorporated in other government agencies including Medicare and Medicaid.
By 2013, several US government agencies used Palantir software for fraud detection and combating terrorism. Initially, the company which struggled to receive funding from private capital firms secured a funding of $196 million in 2013. In December 2014, the company hosted another round of funding from which it raised $450 million from the private funders. The company was gaining a lot of attraction and the number of customers increased rapidly, but Alex Karp decided to not file an IPO. He said that a company like Palantir would become difficult to manage if it goes public. At the end of 2013, the valuation of the company became $9 billion.
Present Days
In the upcoming years, the company gathered more funding and its valuation became $20 billion in 2015. The company also acquired two startups, Kimono Labs and Silk to collect information more efficiently. In 2020, many countries used Palantir technology to track and contain the spread of COVID-19. The company recently developed software called Tiberius that is used for vaccine allocation in the US.
Alex Karp – CEO of Palantir Technologies
Alex Karp is a famous American billionaire whose net worth is $2.1 billion. He went to Haverford College followed by Stanford University, and Goethe University. He studied neoclassical social theory in college. Apart from co-founding Palantir Technologies, Alex is also the co-founder of the money management firm, Caedmon Group.
Annasha Dey is an NIT student, who apart from studying engineering is also a content writer. She has a great interest in photography, writing, reading novels, and travelling as well. She is a foodie who loves socializing and hanging out with her friends. She is also a trained Kathak dancer and a big fashion enthusiast. Dey also loves watching TV series, which includes F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and Big Bang Theory. To be a better writer she prefers to read more