Fortune Archives: How Palantir made it big on big data

Last week, Palantir became one of the most valuable companies in the world, despite not being on the Fortune 500 list because of its relatively small revenue. How did such a small company become so mighty? Fortune’s archives offer some answers to that question: We examined the roots of the company and its Lord of the Rings and superhero nomenclature in a 2016 feature.

Michal Lev Ram spent time with CEO Alex Karp just as Palantir’s commercial business was really taking off—even sitting in on a tai chi class the CEO led in a courtyard at Palantir’s Palo Alto headquarters. (The company has since moved its HQ to Denver.) Palantir was still a private company at the time, making about $1 billion in revenue a quarter. It now makes four times as much. 

When Lev-Ram interviewed Karp, she noted that his company had been known mainly for its government contract work in antiterrorism and spycraft, including rumors of a role in the tracking down of Osama Bin Laden. Palantir was one of the early investments of In-Q-Tel, the Central Intelligence Agency’s private venture investing arm. But by 2016, corporations had become the main driver of Palantir’s

 

Palantir was selling two main data analytics platforms in 2016, Gotham, which is still a core offering for government and defense clients, and Metropolis, which has been discontinued and succeeded by Palantir’s Foundry platform on the commercial side. The idea was to bring together massive, disparate data sources, scour them for connections and patterns that may not be obvious to the human eye, and deliver those findings to customers. J.P. Morgan Chase, Hershey, and Bridgewater Associates were all using Palantir to detect fraud, study consumer behavior, and search for a competitive edge, Lev Ram wrote. 

In the interview, Karp also talked up Palantir’s humanitarian projects, including a refugee relief effort in Syria. “We are conviction addicts,” he told Lev-Ram. “We really want to believe in what we’re doing.” Be that as it may, the company has recently been the target of protests because of its work on immigration enforcement with ICE in the U.S., and its partnership with the Israel Defense Forces for “war-related missions,” among other things. 

And as I wrote in my recent piece, Karp is now striking a more belligerent tone—condemning, for example, the cowardice of “men without chests” in a recent shareholders letter