The History of Palantir EXPLAINED

What is Palantir?

Palantir doesn’t run a social network, sell personal information, or make an app you can download. Yet its software can map government relationships, untangle company supply chains, and support battlefield targeting for the military.

Supporters see a tool that makes institutions smarter and prepares them for 21st century challenges. Critics see infrastructure that could make surveillance and state power dangerously efficient and omnipresent. So… what is it?

Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we’re breaking down what Palantir actually does, who uses it, and why it’s stirred up so much unease.

Once a shadowy Silicon Valley start-up with CIA connections, Palantir is now an S&P 500 company at the center of the AI boom.

According to its 2025 annual report, Palantir’s revenue skyrocketed 56 percent to a massive 4.5 billion dollars, serving nearly a thousand customers. But the biggest slice of that pie? Government clients, who supplied over half of that revenue.

In short: the company’s expansion into AI, immigration enforcement, healthcare, and warfare has transformed an obscure contractor into a political flashpoint.

Palantir was founded in 2003 by a group that included PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and CEO Alex Karp. Its concept grew out of PayPal’s fraud systems, in which software flagged patterns while human investigators supplied judgment.

After 9/11, the founders adapted that concept for intelligence work. Thiel supplied most of the early funding. In-Q-Tel, the CIA-linked venture fund, invested roughly $2 million, and connected Palantir’s engineers with intelligence analysts.

The company took its name from the palantíri, magical seeing stones in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.” They revealed distant events but could also mislead their users. Meanwhile, Palantir developed an explicit mission to supply the United States and its Western allies with superior technology.

Simply put, Palantir helps organizations consolidate the data they already possess, uncover connections inside it, and turn those findings into actionable decisions.

Picture an agency with crime reports, financial information, and decades-old databases that aren’t able to communicate. Palantir places a searchable layer over them, connecting people to payments, addresses, vehicles, or events.

Palantir isn’t, in itself, a universal database or data broker. Customers bring the data; Palantir makes it work together. And that’s where its power lies.

To pull off this massive data puzzle, the company relies on four core pillars. Let’s look under the hood of Palantir’s main platforms.

Gotham connects people, places, reports, and events for governments, police, and militaries. Foundry helps civilian clients coordinate factories, inventory, staffing, or patient care. Apollo deploys Palantir software across clouds, private servers, and classified networks.

AIP, or Artificial Intelligence Platform, connects outside AI models to an organization’s data and operations. Palantir supplies the controlled environment, not usually the underlying model.

At the center of Palantir’s software is its “Ontology,” a digital map that translates raw data into recognizable people, places, objects, events, and relationships. It can then connect that information to possible actions, such as rerouting a shipment or flagging an investigative lead. Essentially, Palantir wants to show clients what happened — and help determine what happens next.

Investigators use Palantir to connect reports, financial records, and surveillance. Its Tiberius platform supported U.S. COVID-19 vaccine distribution. Britain’s NHS also awarded a Palantir-led consortium up to £330 million for a health-data platform, while retaining control of the information.

Palantir has also worked with ICE since at least 2014. In 2025, it received $30 million to build ImmigrationOS, supporting migrant tracking and deportation operations.

Importantly, it’s also battlefield software. Karp said Palantir was responsible for “most of the targeting” in Ukraine. Its tools have also organized alleged war-crimes evidence, and Palantir confirmed a 2024 partnership with Israel’s Ministry of Defense for undisclosed, war-related missions.

Large organizations are drawn to using Palantir’s services because they’re usually held together by incompatible databases, old software, and spreadsheets. Replacing everything can take years, but Palantir promises to sit on top of the mess and make it usable.

For example, its interfaces let nonprogrammers work with data. Palantir also sends “forward-deployed engineers” into customer organizations to customize workflows and repair pipelines.

The appeal comes down to speed and scale: connect more information, expose a pattern faster, and put it before someone who can act. That’s also where the unease begins.

Palantir says customers control their data and its platforms provide permissions, audit logs, and human review. Critics question their use in surveillance, deportation, policing, and military targeting.

Crucially, the software can’t eliminate bad data, bias, or administrative failure. In 2021, several FBI employees accessed restricted evidence — after it was mistakenly tagged as unrestricted — inside a Palantir system. Palantir blamed the client’s failure to follow protocols.

Former employees have said that Palantir can amplify human intentions and biases. A polished dashboard may make incomplete conclusions look objective.

The looming concern isn’t an all-seeing machine, but already-powerful institutions becoming harder to scrutinize.

To understand which institutions Palantir chooses to back, however, you have to understand the politics behind the company. Thiel was an early Trump supporter. Karp has supported Democrats. They share a belief that Western governments and militaries need superior technology, even when building it is controversial.

Google declined to renew its “Project Maven” Pentagon contract following employee protests. Palantir took on work for the project, and Maven is now becoming a long-term component of U.S. military targeting and command operations.

A 2025 order from President Donald Trump, promoting interagency data sharing, raised alarm bells. The New York Times warned that Palantir’s expanding presence could help concentrate information about Americans. In response, Palantir denied building any cross-government master database.

Modern power increasingly depends on turning information into action. AI raises the stakes by proposing decisions and automating workflows. Palantir says humans remain in control, but faster decisions demand stronger oversight.

World governments are also questioning their dependence on American technology. In 2026, France announced plans to replace Palantir inside its domestic intelligence agency. Germany’s military rejected it for now, while British lawmakers warned about vendor lock-in — that is, the cost of becoming overly dependent on one vendor’s product or service.

So, is Palantir the company that watches everything you do? Not quite. It builds the machinery that lets powerful organizations see more clearly across information they already possess.

Do Palantir’s safeguards make its software responsible, or is this much power impossible to contain? Be sure to let us know in the comments.