Palantir Technologies

Palantir Technologies was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Stephen Cohen, Joe Lonsdale, and Nathan Gettings, with early funding and encouragement tied to In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture arm, a starting point that shaped the company's identity as a software firm built for classified and government work from day one. Unlike most companies in this directory, Palantir builds no hardware. Its business is entirely software platforms that let large organizations, mostly government agencies and increasingly militaries, fuse enormous and messy datasets into something analysts and operators can actually act on. Gotham, the original platform, is built for defense and intelligence use, helping analysts connect disparate classified data sources for counterterrorism work, battlefield command, and target identification, and it underpins the Army's Maven Smart System program for AI-assisted analysis of drone and sensor feeds.

Foundry, launched later, adapts the same underlying data-integration approach for commercial and civil government customers, connecting siloed systems across manufacturing, supply chains, and healthcare operations. Apollo is the delivery layer, a system that lets Palantir push software updates and security patches into environments ranging from commercial cloud to classified networks and disconnected battlefield hardware, which matters enormously for a company whose customers include forward-deployed military units. The newest major platform, AIP, layers large language models and AI agents on top of Foundry and Gotham, giving customers a way to build AI-assisted workflows while keeping the underlying data governance the company has built its reputation on. Palantir's government customer list includes the CIA, FBI, NSA, and the Department of Defense broadly, and its defense contracts have grown substantially, including a Navy software deal worth roughly a billion dollars and expanding Army use of its Maven-based target-identification tools in Ukraine-related and other conflicts.

The company also serves the UK's National Health Service and a growing roster of commercial manufacturing and energy clients through Foundry, a deliberate diversification beyond its intelligence-community roots. Palantir went public via a direct listing in September 2020 on the New York Stock Exchange, later moved to Nasdaq, and trades under ticker PLTR with a dual-class share structure that keeps voting control with its founders. It has drawn sustained scrutiny and criticism over its work with US immigration enforcement and its role in military targeting systems, controversies that track the same defense and intelligence relationships that make it valuable to its government customers. The company is now headquartered in the United States after a series of relocations, and after two decades of losses it turned consistently profitable in 2023.