Palantir is the data analytics startup co-founded by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp. The company was established in 2003 and built software for integrating, searching, and analyzing large amounts of information.
Thiel helped fund the venture after his experience at PayPal, while Karp became its chief executive. The founding group also included Stephen Cohen, Joe Lonsdale, and Nathan Gettings, so Thiel and Karp were not the only founders. Still, naming them as co-founders identifies Palantir unambiguously.
The company’s name comes from the “seeing stones” in J. R. R. Tolkien’s legendarium. Palantir initially developed technology for government and intelligence customers, later expanding into commercial products such as Foundry. Its major platforms now include Gotham, Foundry, Apollo, and the Palantir Artificial Intelligence Platform.
A common mix-up is treating Palantir as merely a data broker. It primarily develops software platforms that help organizations connect and analyze their own data, although its government work has made it a frequent subject of privacy and surveillance debates.