Palantir Technologies

In December 2014, Forbes reported that Palantir was looking to raise $400 million in an additional round of financing, after the company filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission the month before. The report was based on research by VC Experts. If completed, Forbes said Palantir's funding could reach $1.2 billion. As of December 2014, the company continued to have diverse private funders, Ken Langone and Stanley Druckenmiller, In-Q-Tel of the CIA, Tiger Global Management, and Founders Fund, a venture firm operated by Thiel.

Palantir was valued at $15 billion in November 2014. In June 2015, BuzzFeed reported the company was raising up to $500 million in new capital at a valuation of $20 billion. By December, it had raised a further $880 million, while the company was still valued at $20 billion. In February 2016, Palantir bought Kimono Labs, a startup that makes it easy to collect information from public-facing websites. In August 2016, Palantir acquired data visualization startup Silk. In 2017, BuzzFeed News reported that Palantir's footing at the CIA and especially the NSA were not stable. But according to Karp, Palantir had a firm hold at the FBI because "They'll have no choice".

2018–present

Palantir was one of four large technology firms to start working with the NHS on supporting COVID-19 efforts through the provision of software from Palantir Foundry, and by April 2020, several countries had used Palantir's technology to track contagion. Palantir also developed Tiberius, a software for vaccine allocation used in the United States.

In August 2020, Palantir Technologies moved its headquarters to Denver, Colorado, distancing itself from the "engineering elite of Silicon Valley... they do not know more about how society should be organized or what justice requires". In September it became a publicly traded company with a direct listing on the NYSE, advertising a goal of becoming the "default operating system across the US". In December 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration awarded Palantir a $44.4 million contract, boosting its shares by about 21%. In February 2023, Palantir reported its first quarter of positive GAAP net income, totaling $31 million. In November 2024, the Navy awarded Palantir a nearly $1 billion software contract. Various outlets have said that the company's actual business and size remain small.

In 2025, Fortune noted that Palantir, with a market capitalization exceeding $400 billion, ranked among the world's most valuable companies by market cap, yet would fail to meet Fortune 500 revenue thresholds (requiring $50+ billion annually in sales). The company's headcount in August 2025 was 4,100, but Karp wanted to reduce it to 3,600. As of May 2025, the second Trump administration had spent $113 million on existing and new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and The Pentagon plus a contract of $795 million with the DOD, while deliberating contracts for the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service.

In 2025, Palantir helped fund the White House's East Wing demolition and planned building of a ballroom.

In February 2026, Palantir announced plans to move its headquarters from Denver, Colorado, to Miami, Florida.

Valuation

The company was valued at $9 billion in December 2013 after raising an additional $107.5 million in funding. Forbes wrote that the valuation made Palantir "among Silicon Valley's most valuable private technology companies". Palantir's valuation rose to $15 billion after a $50 million round of funding in November 2014, and to $20 billion in late 2015 as the company closed an $880 million round of funding. In 2018, Morgan Stanley valued the company at $6 billion. On October 18, 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported that Palantir considered an IPO in the first half of 2019 following a $41 billion valuation. Before its IPO, Palantir had not made a profit. In July 2020, it filed for an IPO, and on September 30, 2020, it went public on the New York Stock Exchange through a direct public offering under the ticker symbol "PLTR".

On September 6, 2024, S&P Global announced that Palantir would be added to the S&P 500 index. Its share price rose 14% the next trading day. On November 14, Palantir announced transfer of its stock listing from the New York Stock Exchange to the Nasdaq Global Select Market effective November 26. The company's Class A Common Stock continued to trade under the symbol PLTR. In 2025, The Economist called Palantir possibly "the most over-valued firm of all time", with a market value of $430 billion—over 600 times its 2024 earnings. As of November 2025, its shares were the most expensive on the S&P 500, at 85 times expected forward annual sales.

Palantir was unprofitable for 20 years, reporting 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.

Investments

Palantir invested approximately $400 million in roughly 20 SPACs, a strategy that simultaneously positioned it as an investor in emerging companies and as a potential software provider to those portfolio companies, according to investment bank RBC Capital Markets.

Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP)

In April 2023, the company launched Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), which integrates large language models into privately operated networks. The company demonstrated its use in war, where a military operator could deploy operations and receive responses via an AI chatbot. Citing potential risks of generative AI, Karp said the product would not let the AI independently carry out targeting operations, but would require human oversight. Commercial companies have also used AIP across many domains. Applications include infrastructure planning, network analysis, and resource allocation.

AIP lets users create LLMs called "agents" through a graphical user interface. Agents can interact with a digital representation of a company's business known as an ontology. This lets the models access an organization's documents and other external resources. Users can define output schemas and test cases to validate AI-generated responses. AIP comes with a library of templates that can be extended by clients. Palantir also offers five-day boot camps to onboard prospective customers. Palantir hosts an annual AIPCon conference featuring demos from existing customers.

TITAN

Palantir's TITAN (Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node) is a mobile command vehicle equipped with AI and analytics software for military field intelligence operations. Developed with IRAD funding in partnership with Anduril Industries and Northrop Grumman, TITAN integrates intelligence and targeting data to support tactical decision-making. The company claims that TITAN can improve customers' ability to conduct long-range precision strikes. Palantir is under contract to deliver 10 units to the U.S. Army.

MetaConstellation

MetaConstellation is a satellite network that supports the deployment of AI models. Users can request information about specific locations, prompting the service to dispatch the necessary resources. MetaConstellation has been used by customers including the United States Northern Command.

MOSAIC

The AI-powered software platform MOSAIC was developed before 2015 and originally used by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to enforce the JCPOA. It integrates over 400 million digital objects globally, such as social media feeds and satellite photographs, as well as surveillance cameras in Iran and the Middle East. This application transformed a civilian software modality into an active weapon during the Iran war, and was used to allocate human targets in Iran.

Skykit

Skykit is a portable toolbox that supports intelligence operations in adverse environments. Palantir offers "Skykit Backpack" and "Skykit Maritime" to be transported by individuals and boats respectively. Contents include battery packs, a ruggedized laptop with company software, and a quadcopter supporting computer vision applications. Skykit can also connect to the MetaConstellation satellite network. In 2023, various sources reported that the Ukrainian military had begun receiving Skykit units.

Palantir Metropolis

Palantir Metropolis (formerly known as Palantir Finance) was software for data integration, information management, and quantitative analytics. The software integrates data from commercial, proprietary, and public sources, enabling analysts to identify trends, relationships, anomalies, and predictive patterns. Aided by 120 "forward-deployed engineers" of Palantir in 2009, Peter Cavicchia III of JPMorgan used Metropolis to surveil employee communications and alert the insider threat team when an employee showed signs of potential disgruntlement: the insider alert team would further scrutinize the employee and possibly stalk them after hours with bank security personnel. The Metropolis team used emails, download activity, browser histories, and GPS locations from JPMorgan-owned smartphones and their transcripts of digitally recorded phone conversations to search, aggregate, sort, and analyze this information for specific keywords, phrases, and patterns of behavior. In 2013, Cavicchia may have shared this information with Frank Bisignano, who had become CEO of First Data Corporation. Palantir Metropolis was succeeded by Palantir Foundry.

ELITE

ELITE (Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement) is a software tool Palantir developed for the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. The program provides a digital map populated with information about potential deportation targets, pulling data from the United States Department of Health and Human Services (which includes Medicaid), among other sources, to estimate the locations of the agency's targets.

Some commentators have said that many conspiracy theories about Palantir have arisen, partly due to the CIA's early involvement and Palantir's initial focus on intelligence contracts, but also partly because the founders, including Thiel and Karp, deliberately crafted an image that exaggerated Palantir's relationship with the CIA or its capacity during its early phase. In 2017, Fortune wrote, "rumors and conspiracy theories have swirled around Palantir." Among these, Fortune named the finding of Osama bin Laden, the national security mystique (the company was already being used for various mundane tasks ranging "from fraud detection to supermarket-shelf positioning, and by governments and nonprofits for everything from coordinating disaster relief to identifying human traffickers"), and the impression that Palantir was an "insider" because of the connection between Thiel and Trump and thus that its suit against the Army was just a power play—according to Fortune, the suit began before it was conceivable to predict that Trump would win the presidency, and the people more likely to influence the relationship between Palantir and the military were Generals Michael Flynn, H. R. McMaster, and James Mattis, who all supported Palantir.

It was reported that Palantir's technological phalanx was crucial in finding Osama bin Laden in 2011. But according to Anthony King, an expert on war studies who has worked with Royal Marine and NATO, the story was at best an exaggeration. King notes that this story about Bin Laden as well as the connection with the Total Information Awareness program were propaganda Thiel used to consolidate the small foothold Palantir had in the defense forces by 2011. In 2021, The New Republic wrote that even when Bloomberg ran an article (with the headline "PALANTIR KNOWS EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU" (2018)) that exaggerated the privacy concerns, Palantir's leaders did nothing, because the story helped raise Palantir's valuation, which reached $40 billion by January 2021.

On the other hand, there were occasions when Palantir's capabilities were underestimated due to non-technical factors like culture clash. In 2012, the Army Test and Evaluation Command (ATEC) produced a positive report about Palantir and recommended the Army install its system but was ordered to modify this report due to sensitivities "about purchased systems in use that came outside the normal acquisitions process". In 2013, the U.S. Army canceled an independent MITRE evaluation that was also mostly positive and found Palantir software to be interoperable with other systems such as DCGS-A. The Pentagon subsequently presented Congress with reports from the Army's acquisition office that contradicted these findings. Fortune notes that the mutual distrust came from differences in working cultures and that Palantir approached the Pentagon with the attitude that the Pentagon was incompetent in developing data platforms. In 2016, Palantir won a lawsuit against the Army for discriminating against its commercial solution in favor of DCGS-A, which was more expensive and risk-prone. The Army appealed in 2017, but the matter was settled after Palantir defeated Raytheon in a head-to-head competition and Palantir won the contract in 2019.

BuzzFeed News reported in 2017 that despite the reputation that connected Palantir to U.S. intelligence agencies (an impression Palantir created in order to win business), including the CIA, NSA, and FBI, the actual relationship was rocky for various reasons, with episodes of friction and recalcitrance. The NSA in particular had been resistant because it had plenty of its own talent and focused more on SIGINT while Palantir's software worked better for HUMINT. Meanwhile, the CIA had been so frustrated by the publicity associating Palantir with it that it tried to cancel the Palantir contract.

Algorithm development

i2 Inc sued Palantir in Federal Court, alleging fraud, conspiracy, and copyright infringement over Palantir's algorithm. Shyam Sankar, Palantir's then-director of business development, used a private eye company known as the cutout for obtaining i2's code. i2 settled out of court for $10 million in 2011.

WikiLeaks proposals (2010)

In 2010, Hunton & Williams LLP allegedly asked Berico Technologies, Palantir, and HBGary Federal to draft a response plan to "the WikiLeaks Threat". In early 2011 Anonymous publicly released HBGary-internal documents, including the plan. The plan proposed that Palantir software would "serve as the foundation for all the data collection, integration, analysis, and production efforts". The plan also included slides, allegedly authored by HBGary CEO Aaron Barr, which suggested "[spreading] disinformation" and "disrupting" Glenn Greenwald's support for WikiLeaks. Palantir CEO Alex Karp ended all ties to HBGary and issued a statement apologizing to "progressive organizations... and Greenwald... for any involvement that we may have had in these matters". Palantir placed an employee on leave pending a review by a third-party law firm. The employee was later reinstated.

Racial discrimination lawsuit (2016)

On September 26, 2016, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs of the U.S. Department of Labor filed a lawsuit against Palantir alleging that the company discriminated against Asian job applicants on the basis of their race. According to the lawsuit, the company "routinely eliminated" Asian applicants during the hiring process, even when they were "as qualified as white applicants" for the same jobs. Palantir settled the suit in April 2017 for $1.7 million while not admitting wrongdoing.

UK

During questioning in front of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, Christopher Wylie, the former research director of Cambridge Analytica, said that Palantir and Cambridge Analytica had had several meetings and that SCL chief executive Alexander Nix had facilitated its use of Aleksandr Kogan's data, which had been obtained from his app "thisisyourdigitallife" by mining personal surveys. Kogan later established Global Science Research to share the data with Cambridge Analytica and others. Wylie confirmed that employees from both Cambridge Analytica and Palantir used Kogan's Global Science Research and harvested Facebook data together in the same offices. Palantir said it had contact with Cambridge Analytica but decided not to move forward with a relationship. Palantir also said that it discovered only in March 2018 that one of its employees, Alfredas Chmieliauskas, had worked with Cambridge Analytica in a personal capacity. When shown proof of Chmieliauskas's activities, the company retracted its denial and issued a press release saying that Chmieliauskas had "engaged in an entirely personal capacity".

Testifying before British lawmakers the same day The Times published its story about Palantir and CA, Wylie said that "senior Palantir employees" had also been involved with CA. He said that "Palantir staff would come into the [CA] office and work on the data". In an interview with The Times, Wylie said that he and Nix had visited Palantir's London office. The New York Times wrote, "emails reviewed by The Times indicate that Mr. Nix and Mr. Chmieliauskas sought to revive talks about a formal partnership through early 2014, but Palantir executives again declined." Wylie admitted that Palantir and Cambridge Analytica signed no contract and had no formal relationship. The New York Times also wrote that Wylie did not identify or specify the number of Palantir employees that he mentioned. In June 2021, reacting to the NHS's use of Foundry, the tech-justice nonprofit Foxglove began a campaign against Palantir because "Their background has generally been in contracts where people are harmed, not healed." Supporting the campaign, Clive Lewis MP said Palantir had an "appalling track record". Palantir UK is headed by Louis Mosley, grandson of British fascist leader Oswald Mosley.

Palantir UK came under scrutiny after allegations about former British Labour politician and Ambassador to the United States Peter Mandelson. In 2026, The Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) called for the immediate release of fully transparent information relating to Mandelson's lobbying firm, Global Counsel, and its role in securing government contracts for Palantir, warning that the current lobbying system is "failing the public".

ICE partnership (since 2014)

Palantir has come under criticism due to its partnership developing software for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In a statement provided to The New York Times, the firm implied that because its contract was with HSI, a division of ICE focused on investigating criminal activities, it played no role in deportations. In 2017, The Intercept obtained documents that disprove this claim and show that ICE considers Palantir's ICM software "mission critical". The documents obtained by The Intercept and Mijente, an immigration advocacy group, show that in 2017 HSI and ERO undertook a joint operation using the ICM database to arrest and possibly deport family members of undocumented children caught trying to cross the border. In August 2019, when HSI, deploying FALCON, led a raid on food-processing plants in Mississippi, nearly 700 people were arrested. In an interview with CNBC a few months later, Karp acknowledged that Palantir's blanket denials had been misleading. But in 2019, he renewed Palantir's contract with ICE for $50 million over three years. Other groups critical of Palantir include the Brennan Center for Justice, National Immigration Project, the Immigrant Defense Project, the Tech Workers Coalition, and Mijente. In one internal ICE report Mijente acquired, Palantir's software was said to have been critical in an operation to arrest the parents of children residing illegally. In September 2020, Amnesty International released a report criticizing Palantir's failure to conduct human rights due diligence for its contracts with ICE. Palantir's human rights record has been scrutinized for contributing to human rights violations of asylum-seekers and migrants. In April 2025, Palantir signed a new $30 million contract with ICE to provide software for a new platform called ImmigrationOS, which would expedite deportations.

Immigration Lifecycle Operating System (Immigration OS)

In April 2025, Palantir was reported to be working closely with ICE to enable deportation in the second presidency of Donald Trump. ICE reportedly paid Palantir $30 million to develop the Immigration Lifecycle Operating System (Immigration OS). The Washington Post reported that Palantir developed the software to track undocumented immigrants with the goal of deporting them faster. The Immigration OS project was renewed in September 2025, despite facing some Palantir employees questioning whether "the contract should be discontinued if ICE's use of the technology veers into extrajudicial actions or violate the company's civil liberties principles". In an October 2025 interview with The New York Times, Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar said that Immigration OS "tracked encounters at the border, asylum applications and applications for benefits". According to Palantir, Immigration OS "does not track information of U.S. citizens who are relatives of undocumented immigrants".

The Immigration OS project has also been criticized by Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham, who wrote that Palantir is "building the infrastructure of the police state". Palantir's continued affiliation with ICE coincided with the changes to its employee code of conduct that were made in response to executive orders by President Trump forbidding federal contractors from diversity practices. In 2022, DHS awarded Palantir $139.3 million for "investigative case management operations, maintenance support services and custom enhancements"; the contract is ongoing as of January 2026.

"HHS Protect Now" and privacy concerns (2020)

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted tech companies to respond to growing demand for citizen information from governments in order to conduct contact tracing and to analyze patient data. Consequently, data collection companies such as Palantir had been contracted to partake in pandemic data collection practices. Palantir's participation in "HHS Protect Now", a program launched by the United States Department of Health and Human Services to track the spread of the coronavirus, attracted criticism from US lawmakers.

Palantir's participation in COVID-19 response projects reignited debates over its involvement in tracking illegal immigrants, especially its alleged effects on digital inequality and restrictions on online freedoms. Critics allege that confidential data acquired by HHS could be exploited by other federal agencies in unregulated and potentially harmful ways. Alternative proposals request greater transparency in the process to determine whether any of the data aggregated would be shared with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to single out illegal immigrants.

Second Trump administration (2025)

According to required financial disclosures, Stephen Miller, who as United States homeland security advisor has been actively involved in the second Trump administration's deportation efforts, owns between $100,000 and $250,000 of Palantir stock; some Trump critics have raised concerns about a potential conflict of interest. Similar financial disclosure requirements of U.S. government employees show that at least 10 other members of the Trump administration own Palantir stock. Advocacy groups such as the Alliance for Secure AI have also criticized Palantir's use of AI during the second Trump administration.

In February 2025, The New York Times reported that Trump and Palantir were compiling a master list of personal information on every American that could give Trump "untold surveillance power" by illegally combining information from various government departments.

In December 2025, it was reported that Palantir had begun to develop a portal for the Department of Education allowing universities to report foreign donations. The company is acting as a subcontractor of Monkton, a computer and network security company, which won a $9.8 million contract to design, develop, and deploy a "Section 117 Information Sharing Environment Capable of Providing Greater Transparency".

German police software (2020s)

There is considerable controversy about the use of Palantir by the state and the Federal Ministry of Interior's ongoing attempt to introduce it at the federal level. The controversy also elicits debate from neighboring countries, with De Tijd noting that even when a German court ruled the software unconstitutional in 2023, it was not abandoned, and the law was changed.

The controversy also touches on Thiel's and Karp's German origins and alleged relationships with powerful political and economic actors in Germany (especially in the wealthier, more powerful states, such as Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Hesse). Hesse is Thiel's home state (he was born in Frankfurt), and Karp completed his PhD there. Hesse was the first federal state to introduce Palantir software (as Hessendata, since 2017) while Bavaria promotes its VeRA version at the federal level. Bavaria Minister of the Interior Joachim Herrmann has said that VeRA must be used nationwide to "create a uniform and effective security infrastructure".

There is also debate about the founders' application of the philosophy of René Girard, Nietzsche, Carl Schmitt, and the Frankfurt School at Palantir and in the surveillance industry. According to a 2025 documentary produced by Hessischer Rundfunk, Karp, like Thiel, seeks world domination. Franz-Josef Hanke, a spokesperson for the Humanist Union in Hesse, has also said that this is Thiel's goal with Palantir.