Imagine a software capable of connecting thousands of different databases – military, healthcare, financial, intelligence – and making them “speak” in real time, identifying hidden patterns and anticipating possible threats. This is, in short, what Palantir Technologies does: one of the most powerful, most discussed and least known technology companies by the general public. Founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and one of the most influential investors in Silicon Valley, together with Alex Karp (current CEO), Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen and Nathan Gettings, Palantir has built its fortune by selling so-called analysis tools big data (huge volumes of digital information) to intelligence agencies and governments around the world.
Its name comes directly from the universe of Tolkien, the writer of The Lord of the Rings: the palantíri they were magical stones that allowed one to see at great distances. A perfect metaphor for a platform that aims to make visible what normally remains hidden in the sea of data. Today Palantir is worth hundreds of billions of dollars on the stock market, has more than 4,000 employees and operates at the crossroads of national security, artificial intelligence and civil rights, a slippery territory, where technology and power intertwine in often controversial ways.
What is Palantir Technologies: the birth of the fight against terrorism and the first investor
Palantir’s roots lie in PayPal. Peter Thiel, one of the company’s founders, had co-founded PayPal (X.com at the time) with Elon Musk and other investors. The year was 1998. When that platform developed a system to detect financial fraud, its engineers realized that the same logic – analyzing large amounts of data to ferret out anomalous behavior – could be applied on a much larger scale. From that intuition Palantir was born, with the declared goal of helping governments fight terrorism without sacrificing civil liberties. A non-random context: the company saw the light in 2003, two years after the attacks of 11 September 2001, when the fight against terrorism had become the absolute priority of Western governments and of the United States first and foremost.
In 2004 the first major investor arrived: In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA, which decided to invest a relatively small sum of £1.3 million. A detail that tells a lot about the company’s profound identity. In its early years Palantir struggled to attract private capital, so much so that an executive at Kleiner Perkins, one of Silicon Valley’s most prestigious funds, openly told its founders that the company was doomed to failure. Yet it survived, thanks to government contracts and the trust of American intelligence agencies.
What it does and what its products are
Palantir develops and sells software that lets you take fragmented data and transform it into clear, actionable operational scenarios. Its flagship product is called Gotham: a platform designed for military analysts and investigators, capable of integrating heterogeneous data sources to identify threats, track movements and reconstruct criminal or terrorist networks, connecting phone calls, movements and financial transactions. In 2013, a classified document leaked to the press revealed that Palantir’s clients included the CIA, NSA (the agency made famous by Edward Snowden’s revelations about mass espionage), the FBI, the Marine Corps and many other US federal agencies. Many of these, before adopting Gotham, worked with completely separate databases that did not communicate with each other.
Alongside Gotham, Palantir has developed Foundry, which is geared towards the private sector: large companies such as Airbus, Merck and BP use it to optimize supply chains, predict risks and analyze industrial data. Apollo arrived in 2022, the engine that allows platforms to be deployed and managed in any environment, including satellites, drones and classified networks. And in 2023, in the wake of the boom in generative artificial intelligence, AIP was launched, which integrates large language models directly into customer systems.
The powerful US company amidst scandals and controversies
The COVID-19 pandemic marked a turning point in Palantir’s public visibility. Governments in the United States, United Kingdom, Netherlands and Colombia relied on its tools to coordinate data on infections, hospitalizations and vaccine distribution. That visibility, however, also opened a debate that will never end: how far can the collection and analysis of data by governments go before it becomes mass surveillance?
The controversy and controversies didn’t stop there. Predictive policing software used by departments in Los Angeles and New Orleans has been criticized for risking reinforcing algorithmic bias and fueling racial profiling. Involvement in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, where the software helped the Ukrainian army track enemy movements and document war crimes, has drawn mixed reactions. Even more divisive was the contract with the Israel Defense Forces during the military campaign in Gaza in 2024. And in 2025, a $30 million deal with the US immigration agency, ICE, to support deportation operations, sparked protests in many areas of the United States.
Palantir’s response to these accusations has always been, more or less, the same: The company does not collect or sell data, but provides software that helps customers analyze information they already have legal access to. It’s an important distinction. However, it is not always enough to allay the concerns of those who fear that such powerful tools, in the wrong hands, could transform into machines of social control.
