
Palantir raises $680M - bane
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/u-data-company-palantir-raises-003057349.html
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adenadel
According to Crunchbase this is the 17th round of funding. That seems insane
to me.

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onion2k
Series Q. Quite appropriate in a James Bond spy movie kind of way.

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mtgx
But Palantir is that villain trying to put everyone under surveillance.

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onion2k
So more like Star Trek's Q then?

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discodave
Why do they need more cash? This seems like a business model where they should
be profitable already. If they are not, what do investors expect to change to
lead to the profits-promised-land?

Contrast to Atlassian which built an (arguably) much more scalable software
business with much less funding.

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ryporter
I don't think that, strictly speaking, Palantir "needs" more cash. However, it
puts them in a more secure position grow aggressively, even if markets take a
hit in 2016.

Contrasting them to Atlassian, Palantir is much more ambitious. While they are
best known for their government work, they are now far more than a government
contractor. They have very strongly expanded to into many different other
fields, and aim to be the data analysis leader, period. In that sense, they
are a more scalable business.

To be clear, I'm certainly not saying that Palantir's approach is any way
superior. It is certainly more risky. My point is that, while Atlassian is
steadily profitable, Palantir is pursuing a path of "Go big, or go home."
Raising more money lowers the chance of "going home."

(Disclosure: I worked at Palantir from '06-'08\. Everything I post about them
is my own opinion based on publicly disclosed facts.)

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MaxScheiber
To be clear, they raised $129M in this exact round of funding, which
complements $550M previously raised in 2015.

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bane
They also raised $605.49 in 2014. Total funding to date is $1.8B over 17
rounds. At a $20B valuation this puts them at about 11:1 valuation over
funding, which is informative about their investors guess into their growth
prospects.

[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/palantir-
technologie...](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/palantir-
technologies#/entity)

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josephjrobison
Data is the oil of the 21st century.

This one seems like the sleeping giant of the top venture-backed companies. I
suppose the media can't as easily describe and talk about it and understand it
as much as Uber or AirBnb, so they just move on to the more fun companies.

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hyperbovine
> Data is the oil of the 21st century.

Interesting. So you're saying we'll reach "peak data" in about 100 years?

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alex_hirner
Interesting thought, I suspect there is something like peak computation per
ft^3 and we will hit such barriers earthbound (with quantum computing being
the equivalent to solar+cheap storage for this problem).

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jacquesm
The SF term is 'computronium'.

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nthitz
Can anyone please give a non-vague answer to what Palantir does?

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hendzen
Palantir has a core team of engineers building out a very general data
analysis framework. Their core product consists of a GUI for manipulating and
sharing annotated graphs (i.e. edges and vertices). The actual edges and
vertices of the graph can have complex types defined by some arbitrarily
detailed ontology. The GUI also includes tools for producing visualizations
and charts from numerical and textual attributes of the edges/vertices. The
core product is very powerful when configured properly and it is used to solve
important problems in both government and industry.

Palantir also has a _much_ larger corps of consulting engineers (FDEs in
Palantir parlance) who actually build the ontologies, import a customer's data
in to Palantir, and then provide ongoing support to users. A huge portion of
this work is writing scripts to munge the data from arbitrary formats (SQL
tables, CSV, Excel, etc) to the format supported by Palantir. A core reason
for Palantir's success is that they convince large numbers of top engineering
students from MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, etc, to do this relatively
unglamorous work for below-market pay.

Due to the imbalance in headcount between core engineering and the consulting
division, Palantir, in practice, operates more similarly to Accenture or
McKinsey than to Google or Facebook. However, for some unknown reason, their
valuation seems to be calculated like that of a high margin software company,
rather than like that of a low-margin services business. In particular, to
increase revenue by N dollars, Palantir needs to hire O(N) employees.

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serge2k
> A core reason for Palantir's success is that they convince large numbers of
> top engineering students from MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, etc, to do
> this relatively unglamorous work for below-market pay.

how?

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lordlarm
[https://www.palantir.com/life-at-palantir/](https://www.palantir.com/life-at-
palantir/) should give you a hint. They're doing Google style benefits.

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eru
But Google also gives Google style benefits and better than below market
salaries.

(I guess, there's no mystery: some people apply at Palantir. Even more apply
at Google.)

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sgt
I am just curious - what kind of technology does Palantir use? By that I mean
- what kind of databases, which programming languages, how do they scale and
so on.

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MasterScrat
For frontend they use TypeScript:
[https://www.palantir.com/2013/12/announcing-three-open-
sourc...](https://www.palantir.com/2013/12/announcing-three-open-source-
projects-for-developing-with-typescript/)

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unixhero
Pardon my ignorance. But at a funding level of USD680M, isn't it more prudent
to do an IPO?

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loosescrews
They don't seem to think that is a good idea:
[http://www.cnbc.com/2014/03/19/free-advice-dont-go-public-
sa...](http://www.cnbc.com/2014/03/19/free-advice-dont-go-public-says-
palantirs-ceo.html)

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nova22033
>best known for helping the U.S. government track down al Qaeda leader Osama
bin Laden

Is this true?

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kqr
Yes. Their software analyses connections between people and locations in huge
databases of call records, email correspondence, money transfers and so on and
so forth.

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oliv__
Haha first time in a while that I see a link to yahoo.com on the front page.
Marissa is that you?

