Responding to a request for detailed comment from Wired, Lisa Gordon said the company “proudly supports the U.S. government, especially our fighters” and that it has never escaped its founding mission “to support the West and empower the world’s most important institutions.” Gordon added that the open letter criticizing Palantir was signed only by about 8,000 employees and alumni of the company.
The dawn of big data
Below jargon and marketing, Palantir sells tools for its customers (nonprofits, government agencies) that can be classified by data. What sets Palantir different from other tech companies is the size and scope of its products. According to a 2022 analysis of Palantir products published by Blogger and data engineer Ben Rogojan, their pitch to potential customers is that they can buy a system and use it to replace more than a dozen other dashboards and programs.
Crucially, Palantir won’t reorganize the company’s bins and pipelines, meaning it won’t change the way data is collected or how it moves through the guts of the organization. Instead, its software sits on top of customers’ messy systems and allows them to integrate and analyze data without repairing the underlying architecture. In some ways, this is a technical band-aid. This theoretically makes Palantir particularly suitable for government agencies that may use state-of-the-art software with programming languages dating back to the 1960s.
Palantir began to flourish in the 2010s, and this was a decade of corporate business discourse dominated by the “rise of big data”. Hundreds of tech startups pop up hopefully disrupting the market thanks to smartphones and internet-connected sensors, and this information is now readily available, including from global transportation modes to college students’ social media habits. The hype around big data puts pressure on companies, especially legacy brands without complex technical knowledge, to upgrade their software, which would otherwise be as risky as dinosaurs look like customers and investors.
However, upgrading computer systems that may go back years or even decades is not easy or cheap. Companies may want to wear all the designed solutions on top of what they already have, rather than tearing down everything and rebuilding it. That’s where Palantir came in.
Palantir’s software is designed with non-technical users in mind. Instead of relying on professional technical teams to parse and analyze data, Palantir gives insights to people across the organization, sometimes without writing a single line of code. All they need to do is log in to one of Palantir’s two main platforms: for commercial users or for foundries in Gotham, for law enforcement and government users.
Sales stadium
Foundry focuses on helping businesses use data to manage inventory, monitor factory lines and track orders, etc. Meanwhile, Gotham is an investigative tool specifically targeting police and government clients, aiming to connect people, locations and incidents that law enforcement officers are interested in. There is also Apollo, which is like a control panel for shipping automatic software updates to Foundry or Gotham, and an AI platform, an AI-powered tool that can be integrated into Gotham or Foundry.
Foundry and Gotham are both similar: ingesting data and providing people with a clean platform to use it. The main difference between them is the data they are ingesting. Gotham obtains any data that the government or law enforcement clients may have, including crime reports, booking logs or information collected by subpoena social media companies. Then, Gotham extracts everyone, place and details that may be relevant. Customers need to already have the data they want to use – Palantir itself does not provide any data.
