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Can someone explain to me what is the Palantir's business model ? I haven't heard any large, meaningful project they been involved in, but I keep hearing the co

Can someone explain to me what is the Palantir's business model ? I haven't heard any large, meaningful project they been involved in, but I keep hearing the company name & how hot they are and their stocks are going to blow-up any day (some of my friends kept their stocks for the last 4-5 years with very little gain compared to other software companies). I know of the smaller software companies that are less than 100 people and have a very meaningful impact in DoD & Gov space.

maeil 2y ago
They basically have two. Just like e.g. Amazon has both retail and cloud infra as separate, independent business models. One is described well in the article, originally aimed at commercial clients. The article isn't short but we're on HN, not Reddit, so we should read the articles. Parts 2 and 3 describe it. The linked note at the end of 3 is very relevant. The other one is the gov one, which is also mentioned as "Palantir has prevented terrorist attacks". The article actually links to lots of product docs. It isn't secretive, plenty of videos on Youtube demoing the software. The docs are public, which is more open than can be said for 90% of software in their price range.
Manuel_D 2y ago
When I interned at Palantir (summer 2014) their business was mostly in data ingestion, visualization, and correlation. A typical workflow for a Palantir customer was that Palantir would come in and dump a ton of data out of old crufty databases and into Palantir's datastore. Then, they'd establish connections between that data. This is all sounds kind of hand-wavy, but the gist of it is that a lot of government agencies have data that lives in separate databases and they can't easily correlate data between those two databases. Once the data was in Palantir's system, they could do queries against all their data, and make connections and correlations that they wouldn't otherwise be able to find when the data was previously siloed. One of the sample use cases was identifying people filling prescriptions for schedule II drugs multiple times on the same day, and correlating that with pharmacies run by people connected to known drug traffickers. Previously, this was hard to do because the database of prescription purchases was disconnected from the database of drug convictions.
- hammock 2y ago
  So it’s hygiene and structure
  - Manuel_D 2y ago
    That, and a really powerful visualization suite. In the example I gave above, you could plot the prescription purchases on a map and see that people were driving along the highway and hitting up pharmacies along the interstate. Better yet, you could drop into Google Street view in front of one of the pharmacies, and look at it from the street level and see that it doesn't even have signage indicating it's a pharmacy.
    - swells34 2y ago
      I used it quite a bit early on during military operations. The ability to see the timing component was key; not only would you plot the purchase locations, but you could play the timeframe of records, work out the timing so you knew the order in which they visited the locations, where they must have stopped for gas along the route. In a classic workflow, you'd then investigate the gas stations, attach them to the event with confidence intervals, pull CCTV footage, see if you can get a payment receipt, and enter all of that data back into palantir. A few days of doing this, and you can build up all a map of every aspect of the drug run; the who what when where and why. It's a fantastic organization system.
      - lapphi 2y ago
        I appreciate the technical achievements here. However, I wonder how long before it’s standard practice to track all peoples movement, not just those suspected of a crime. I know of at least one YouTube channel that is always recording all traffic camera streams in Washington so there must be some State entities doing the same. Back in 2020 there was a twitch channel that would play a 9x9 grid of all the livestream footage from the George Floyd protests. I’m sure an archive of that exists somewhere on a LE server.
        2y ago
stephencoyner 2y ago
They have a few brand new products that are quite compelling. Warp Speed: Aims to integrate ERP, MES, PLM, and factory floor systems into a single AI-driven platform. As opposed to legacy ERP systems, it focuses on production optimization rather than just financial tracking. Warp Speed has the potential to relegate legacy systems to backend data storage, shifting the entire intelligence layer (and value) to Palantir's system. Warp Speed targets both innovative new manufacturers (they note Tesla and Space X alums starting new companies) and traditional large-scale operations. Mission Manager: enables other defense contractors to build on Palantir's platform and benefit from their security infrastructure and position of trust within government. You can think of it as an AWS for defense companies; plug and play with the foundations handled for you. While the product just launched in Q4 2023, they just received a new $33 million CDAO Open DAGIR contract. While this is possibly just an advanced POC, it represents significant potential for future growth and wider adoption in the defense sector. Now is the perfect time. From 2021 to 2023, VC firms invested nearly $100 billion in defense tech startup companies, a 40% increase from the previous seven years combined. Time is the most important thing for these startups and Mission Manager shows the potential to save lots of it.
- NicoJuicy 2y ago
  > Now is the perfect time The perfect time is yesterday. All defense companies already went way up. Palantir... Not so much
  - stephencoyner 2y ago
    The stock is up 152% YTD. I think they went up?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
melling 2y ago
The stock has blown up. It has more than doubled for me. Almost tripled. It’s quite expensive now. I would encourage you to do your own research. For some reason, HN has very little depth in stock market understanding. HN passed on META at $100. I know there are some very knowledgeable people here. Wish there was a way to create a “subreddit “ here without all the Reddit noise.
- sakopov 2y ago
  If you were buying in the $6s, it nearly 7x'ed in like a year
- rabf 2y ago
  One of the reasons I still frequent this forum is to countertrade the espoused opinions. Meta@100 was such an easy buy, Everyone was talking as if they were going out of business because they did not like the idea of the metaverse. A quick look at their earnings said that was utter nonsesnse. So bizarre to see all jounalists and many users here to attribute the turn around to them pivoting to AI when that was not at all what the CEO was saying during that time. Always look for primary sources, opinions are funny.
- nodesocket 2y ago
  HN has always lacked economic and stock market knowledge and instincts generally speaking. Most comments tend to say it’s rigged, evil capitalist, etc. Guessing because hackers generally tend to swing far left and socialist though weird as a lot of founder and entrepreneurs are active on HN as well. There is a long tradition of show HN were the comments poo poo startups and ideas which end up being huge and the opposite is also true with praise and admiration of failures.
  - fijiaarone 2y ago
    Common sense gets in the way of gamblers instinct.
  - kubami 2y ago
    Are there any good forums where people do have good market knowledge and share it?
joewhale 2y ago
It all comes down to if you have the right sales people that can land large govt contracts. The rest is figuring it out as you go. This is an incredible moat for them. Whoever gets these large govt contracts first in their space wins.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
swordsmith 2y ago
I use Foundry for work. It makes data ingestion, cleaning, quality check and automation easy. After all the data is ingested, running analysis/RAG on them become extremely easy. Basically, it's end-to-end data engineering and analytics. And the more a company uses/invests into the platform, the more benefit and locked-in they are.
- hermitcrab 2y ago
  RAG?
  - mandevil 2y ago
    Retrieval Augmented Generation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrieval-augmented_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrieval-augmented_generation Basically, using your actual data/documents to supplement a general purpose LLM and generate better answers for your specific use case.
- alexpetralia 2y ago
  "End-to-end data engineering and analytics" is quite a bold claim from a single service provider. Here is the link for anyone interested: https://www.palantir.com/platforms/foundry/ https://www.palantir.com/platforms/foundry/ and a YouTube explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGGRCTTjLfQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGGRCTTjLfQ Given you've used it, just how self-service is it? To me this seems like such a large claim that - if it's doable - I'm surprised there are not more competitors in the "vertically integrated data providers" space.
  - maeil 2y ago
    > Given you've used it, just how self-service is it? To me this seems like such a large claim that - if it's doable - I'm surprised there are not more competitors in the "vertically integrated data providers" space. It is both very self service and not very self service. That's why they employ the FDE model from the article, to actually ingrain it into the client company to the point that it becomes self service. It's extremely hard to build such a product from scratch and have it actually be good, that's why there's no competitors. Especially providing the finely grained security controls that the article talks about, and have the platform be secure. There's a reason their security team wins the biggest CTFs half the time.
sangnoir 2y ago
> Can someone explain to me what is the Palantir's business model AFAICT, it is government & government-adjacent contracting using techniques borrowed from big tech and WITCH, since big tech won't directly court government sw contracts, and WITCH may fail at getting clearances for foreign-based personnel.
- ericjmorey 2y ago
  WITCH?
  - dullcrisp 2y ago
    WITCH!!
  - wpasc 2y ago
    I was curious too; here's an HN link spelling it out and discussing in context of working there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27571707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27571707
  - sangnoir 2y ago
    Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, and HCL. i.e. "large tech consulting companies" if you're feeling generous, "body shops" if you're not.
sleepybrett 2y ago
your own private digital cia, for hire to the highest bidder.
itronitron 2y ago
They're like Oracle in that they focus their sales activity on the untouchable managers of managers, but their focus is on data integration and data analytics.

maeil 2y ago

They basically have two. Just like e.g. Amazon has both retail and cloud infra as separate, independent business models. One is described well in the article, originally aimed at commercial clients. The article isn't short but we're on HN, not Reddit, so we should read the articles. Parts 2 and 3 describe it. The linked note at the end of 3 is very relevant. The other one is the gov one, which is also mentioned as "Palantir has prevented terrorist attacks". The article actually links to lots of product docs. It isn't secretive, plenty of videos on Youtube demoing the software. The docs are public, which is more open than can be said for 90% of software in their price range.

Manuel_D 2y ago

When I interned at Palantir (summer 2014) their business was mostly in data ingestion, visualization, and correlation. A typical workflow for a Palantir customer was that Palantir would come in and dump a ton of data out of old crufty databases and into Palantir's datastore. Then, they'd establish connections between that data. This is all sounds kind of hand-wavy, but the gist of it is that a lot of government agencies have data that lives in separate databases and they can't easily correlate data between those two databases. Once the data was in Palantir's system, they could do queries against all their data, and make connections and correlations that they wouldn't otherwise be able to find when the data was previously siloed. One of the sample use cases was identifying people filling prescriptions for schedule II drugs multiple times on the same day, and correlating that with pharmacies run by people connected to known drug traffickers. Previously, this was hard to do because the database of prescription purchases was disconnected from the database of drug convictions.

hammock 2y ago
So it’s hygiene and structure
- Manuel_D 2y ago
  That, and a really powerful visualization suite. In the example I gave above, you could plot the prescription purchases on a map and see that people were driving along the highway and hitting up pharmacies along the interstate. Better yet, you could drop into Google Street view in front of one of the pharmacies, and look at it from the street level and see that it doesn't even have signage indicating it's a pharmacy.
  - swells34 2y ago
    I used it quite a bit early on during military operations. The ability to see the timing component was key; not only would you plot the purchase locations, but you could play the timeframe of records, work out the timing so you knew the order in which they visited the locations, where they must have stopped for gas along the route. In a classic workflow, you'd then investigate the gas stations, attach them to the event with confidence intervals, pull CCTV footage, see if you can get a payment receipt, and enter all of that data back into palantir. A few days of doing this, and you can build up all a map of every aspect of the drug run; the who what when where and why. It's a fantastic organization system.
    - lapphi 2y ago
      I appreciate the technical achievements here. However, I wonder how long before it’s standard practice to track all peoples movement, not just those suspected of a crime. I know of at least one YouTube channel that is always recording all traffic camera streams in Washington so there must be some State entities doing the same. Back in 2020 there was a twitch channel that would play a 9x9 grid of all the livestream footage from the George Floyd protests. I’m sure an archive of that exists somewhere on a LE server.
      - 2y ago

stephencoyner 2y ago

They have a few brand new products that are quite compelling. Warp Speed: Aims to integrate ERP, MES, PLM, and factory floor systems into a single AI-driven platform. As opposed to legacy ERP systems, it focuses on production optimization rather than just financial tracking. Warp Speed has the potential to relegate legacy systems to backend data storage, shifting the entire intelligence layer (and value) to Palantir's system. Warp Speed targets both innovative new manufacturers (they note Tesla and Space X alums starting new companies) and traditional large-scale operations. Mission Manager: enables other defense contractors to build on Palantir's platform and benefit from their security infrastructure and position of trust within government. You can think of it as an AWS for defense companies; plug and play with the foundations handled for you. While the product just launched in Q4 2023, they just received a new $33 million CDAO Open DAGIR contract. While this is possibly just an advanced POC, it represents significant potential for future growth and wider adoption in the defense sector. Now is the perfect time. From 2021 to 2023, VC firms invested nearly $100 billion in defense tech startup companies, a 40% increase from the previous seven years combined. Time is the most important thing for these startups and Mission Manager shows the potential to save lots of it.

NicoJuicy 2y ago
> Now is the perfect time The perfect time is yesterday. All defense companies already went way up. Palantir... Not so much
- stephencoyner 2y ago
  The stock is up 152% YTD. I think they went up?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

melling 2y ago

The stock has blown up. It has more than doubled for me. Almost tripled. It’s quite expensive now. I would encourage you to do your own research. For some reason, HN has very little depth in stock market understanding. HN passed on META at $100. I know there are some very knowledgeable people here. Wish there was a way to create a “subreddit “ here without all the Reddit noise.

sakopov 2y ago
If you were buying in the $6s, it nearly 7x'ed in like a year
rabf 2y ago
One of the reasons I still frequent this forum is to countertrade the espoused opinions. Meta@100 was such an easy buy, Everyone was talking as if they were going out of business because they did not like the idea of the metaverse. A quick look at their earnings said that was utter nonsesnse. So bizarre to see all jounalists and many users here to attribute the turn around to them pivoting to AI when that was not at all what the CEO was saying during that time. Always look for primary sources, opinions are funny.
nodesocket 2y ago
HN has always lacked economic and stock market knowledge and instincts generally speaking. Most comments tend to say it’s rigged, evil capitalist, etc. Guessing because hackers generally tend to swing far left and socialist though weird as a lot of founder and entrepreneurs are active on HN as well. There is a long tradition of show HN were the comments poo poo startups and ideas which end up being huge and the opposite is also true with praise and admiration of failures.
- fijiaarone 2y ago
  Common sense gets in the way of gamblers instinct.
- kubami 2y ago
  Are there any good forums where people do have good market knowledge and share it?

joewhale 2y ago

It all comes down to if you have the right sales people that can land large govt contracts. The rest is figuring it out as you go. This is an incredible moat for them. Whoever gets these large govt contracts first in their space wins.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

swordsmith 2y ago

I use Foundry for work. It makes data ingestion, cleaning, quality check and automation easy. After all the data is ingested, running analysis/RAG on them become extremely easy. Basically, it's end-to-end data engineering and analytics. And the more a company uses/invests into the platform, the more benefit and locked-in they are.

hermitcrab 2y ago
RAG?
- mandevil 2y ago
  Retrieval Augmented Generation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrieval-augmented_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrieval-augmented_generation Basically, using your actual data/documents to supplement a general purpose LLM and generate better answers for your specific use case.
alexpetralia 2y ago
"End-to-end data engineering and analytics" is quite a bold claim from a single service provider. Here is the link for anyone interested: https://www.palantir.com/platforms/foundry/ https://www.palantir.com/platforms/foundry/ and a YouTube explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGGRCTTjLfQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGGRCTTjLfQ Given you've used it, just how self-service is it? To me this seems like such a large claim that - if it's doable - I'm surprised there are not more competitors in the "vertically integrated data providers" space.
- maeil 2y ago
  > Given you've used it, just how self-service is it? To me this seems like such a large claim that - if it's doable - I'm surprised there are not more competitors in the "vertically integrated data providers" space. It is both very self service and not very self service. That's why they employ the FDE model from the article, to actually ingrain it into the client company to the point that it becomes self service. It's extremely hard to build such a product from scratch and have it actually be good, that's why there's no competitors. Especially providing the finely grained security controls that the article talks about, and have the platform be secure. There's a reason their security team wins the biggest CTFs half the time.

sangnoir 2y ago

> Can someone explain to me what is the Palantir's business model AFAICT, it is government & government-adjacent contracting using techniques borrowed from big tech and WITCH, since big tech won't directly court government sw contracts, and WITCH may fail at getting clearances for foreign-based personnel.

ericjmorey 2y ago
WITCH?
- dullcrisp 2y ago
  WITCH!!
- wpasc 2y ago
  I was curious too; here's an HN link spelling it out and discussing in context of working there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27571707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27571707
- sangnoir 2y ago
  Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, and HCL. i.e. "large tech consulting companies" if you're feeling generous, "body shops" if you're not.

sleepybrett 2y ago

your own private digital cia, for hire to the highest bidder.

itronitron 2y ago

They're like Oracle in that they focus their sales activity on the untouchable managers of managers, but their focus is on data integration and data analytics.