Two bets made by Palantir leadership around the time of its founding are, two decades later, starting to look prescient. First, the company turned an operating profit for the first time in 2023, proving that its business model—ingraining its Big Data analytics software in government agencies and large enterprises—can work. Shareholders agree: its stock price nearly tripled between April 2023 and April 2024. Advances in AI have been key to success, says chief technology officer Shyam Sankar: “You need to work backwards from the business problem,” he says. “With AI, you can do that in eight hours instead of eight weeks.”
Second, the company, led by CEO Alex Karp, fashions itself as a defender of the West. In 2003, this made Palantir an outlier, but more recently, Silicon Valley has followed in its footsteps, launching security-focused funds and defense tech startups. True to its mission, Palantir has been heavily involved in Ukraine’s war efforts. Last year it took out a full-page ad in the New York Times reading “Palantir stands with Israel,” and in January it signed an agreement with the country’s Defense Ministry to provide its technology to “war-related missions.”