An American big-data firm set up in 2003 to help America fight terrorism. Palantir is a partner in Anthropic's classified work for the Department of War, alongside Amazon Web Services. It was incubated by Peter Thiel and Founders Fund. Led by Alex Karp. As of November 2025, Palantir's market value stood at nearly $450bn—equivalent to 137 times its trailing twelve-month sales and 624 times its net profit. For comparison, Nvidia, the most valuable company in the world, trades at a comparatively meagre 28 times sales and 54 times net profit; Cisco at its dotcom-bubble peak was valued at about 200 times annual profit. The company has about 4,000 employees and maintains gross margins above 80%. Palantir's frothy valuation is partly a product of the herd instincts of America's indefatigable retail investors. Former employees have joined the Trump administration. Its customers range from America's Central Intelligence Agency to Wendy's, a fast-food chain.
For about 20 years after its founding Palantir did not make a profit; it did not generate its first annual profit until 2023. Its unusual business model relied on embedding highly paid "forward deployed engineers" (FDEs) with customers—a practice it calls "forward deployment"—hand-crafting software to solve bespoke problems. As FDEs customise Palantir's products, they use that knowledge to make the software more useful, meaning the work they do for one client is valuable for others. The trickier the challenge, the bigger the reward for Palantir. The FDE model has proved so successful that it has spawned imitators across Silicon Valley; OpenAI and Anthropic are among the tech firms that have lately been hiring FDEs.
Its AI platform, AIP, which maps and organises customers' data to help them run large language models, has been a major growth driver. Revenue in the quarter from July to September 2025 was up by 63% year on year, and operating profit rose by 248%. The operating margin hit 33%. Palantir closed 53 deals worth more than $10m in that quarter, up from just 16 a year before. Morgan Stanley commented that it was "hard to find a better fundamental story in software". Its "rule of 40" score—the sum of operating margin and year-on-year sales growth—is 94, higher than any other enterprise-software firm of equivalent or greater sales; among the world's 25 biggest companies by market value, only Nvidia scores higher. Although Palantir began by serving governments, it now makes over two-fifths of its revenue from businesses. Analysts at UBS describe Palantir as "McKinsey meets Databricks".
Palantir, SpaceX and Anduril form a trio of "neo-primes"—software-first firms competing with legacy armsmakers. Palantir builds the core of America's and NATO's command-and-control software and is now worth more than RTX (formerly Raytheon), the most valuable of the traditional defence primes.
Palantir built the Maven Smart System, a military decision-support tool used by America's armed forces and NATO to fuse intelligence and generate targets at industrial scale. In March 2026 the Department of War said Maven would become a "programme of record", locking in funding for years ahead. It is also leading a partnership with Anduril to help the army improve battlefield targeting. It is also reportedly part of a consortium, alongside Anduril and SpaceX, bidding for Trump's "Golden Dome" missile-defence shield, offering software to track and analyse incoming missiles. In 2025 it won a $30m contract to support the federal government's immigration crackdown. Shyam Sankar is its chief technology officer.
When Palantir suffered a short-seller attack in April 2026, Donald Trump leapt to its defence, writing: "Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has proven to have great war-fighting capabilities and equipment. Just ask our enemies!!!" Trump's first election campaign received a big donation from Palantir's founder.
On April 17th 2025 ICE published a contract notice urgently seeking a powerful AI model to find and prioritise individuals eligible for deportation. A prototype of the "streamlined end-to-end immigration lifecycle" software, called ImmigrationOS, was to be delivered by Palantir by the end of September 2025. In the 13 months since Trump's second term began, ICE's parent Department of Homeland Security had awarded $1.2bn in IT contracts, of which more than $81m went to Palantir. According to Patrick Lechleitner, who led ICE in the final stretch of Joe Biden's administration, ImmigrationOS will make information collected for criminal cases also "usable and useful" for civil immigration cases. The software is reportedly being configured to alert agents to the existence and location of potentially helpful information that privacy rules have kept off-limits, and then to advise agents on steps to obtain lawful access.
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.