Palantir: The Next Billion-Dollar Company Raises $90 Million
“Palantir, a team of 250-plus engineers nestled in downtown Palo Alto, has raised $90 million in Series D financing at a $735 million valuation— the company exclusively told TechCrunch. The round was led by co-founder Peter Thiel’s The Founders Fund and included Youniversity Ventures, Glynn Capital, Miriam Rivera’s Ulu Ventures, Jeremy Stoppleman, Ben Ling, and a couple of high-profile NY funds.”
http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/25/palantir-the-next-billion-dollar-company-raises-90-million/
Hot Party, Cool Technologies
“Amidst the open data and gov 2.0 movement, Palantir is leading the effort to integrate, visualize, analyze and make sense of the world’s information. A flat organization of approximately 280 employees, Palantir employs no sales-people, and consists mainly of engineers. Shyam Sankar, Palantir’s 28-year old VP of Business Development who spoke at this year’s TED on the use of Palantir to uncover GhostNet, a large Chinese cyberspying operation, believes by hiring extremely bright, energetic and capable individuals, Palantir doesn’t need the sales and marketing people. The employees and the product sell the company.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jen-consalvo/hot-party-cool-technologi_b_607043.html
Palantir at the Community Health Data Initiative Forum
Palantir’s Alex Fishman demonstrates how our software is being used to “accelerate both policy holder response at the federal level…and link people together with problem solvers on the ground.”
Palantir Technologies Talks How Agencies Can Use Technology for Transparency @ Gov 2.0 Expo Preview
Focus Washington TechView sits down with Alex Fishman from Palantir Technologies to capture insights on how government agencies can use technology to increase their efforts on transparency to citizens.
PayPal-Based Technology Helped Bust India’s And The Dalai Lama’s Cyberspies
“What made Palantir’s intelligence platform, called Palantir Government, a tool of choice for the Munk Centre investigators was its ability to handle and slice large sets of data using very granular controls.”
On the Fight Against Cyberterror
“The cyberthreat, like other asymmetric threats, continually tests our ability to protect our citizens without sacrificing their privacy and civil liberties. For Americans, solutions that attempt to achieve security at the cost of personal freedom pose their own unique threat to our way of life.”
The Recovery, Accountability, and Transparency Board
CNN takes a look at Earl Devaney and the Recovery, Accountability, and Transparency Board, a department in charge of rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse using the Palantir platform.
How Team of Geeks Cracked Spy Trade
“One of the latest entrants into the government spy-services marketplace, Palantir Technologies has designed what many intelligence analysts say is the most effective tool to date to investigate terrorist networks.”
http://webreprints.djreprints.com/2262001222159.html
A Conversation with Alexander Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies
“There is no point in having a war on terrorism if civil liberties are being undermined to the extent that we aren’t willing to fight that war.”
New Tools to Fight Cyber Attacks
“Today’s cyber terrorists are highly adaptive. The complexity and stealth of their attacks necessitate a new class of detection software to identify and understand where vulnerabilities exist,” said Goel. “Palantir will provide us with a platform that is able to reduce information from multiple data sources into a form where it can be coherently analyzed.”
http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=827652&category=BUSINESS
Analysts Turn To Software For Spotting Terrorists
“Intelligence information basically comes in two forms — structured and unstructured data. Structured data have fields, like a spreadsheet. It is relatively easy to search. Unstructured data, which is the form most intelligence information comes in, are like notes in a reporter’s notebook. There is a tip here, a phone call there. Palantir can search both kinds of data simultaneously.”
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106538028
A Tech Fix For Illegal Government Snooping?
“Most people in America believe you can either fight terrorism — i.e., identify and get the terrorists — or you can protect our civil liberties — i.e., make sure the government isn’t looking at our personal information when they are not allowed to,” says Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp. “And that dichotomy used to be true. We’ve found a way to tag information so the only people who can see it are those who are allowed to see it, so it takes care of that problem.”
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106479613&ft=1&f=1014
Palantir on BusinessWeek’s 50 Best Tech Startups
“…Palantir Technologies is all about making massive troves of data understandable and finding useful patterns in them. Canadian investigators used the software to uncover the hacking of computers in 103 countries including that of the Dalai Lama. The U.S. Army used it to analyze al Qaeda recruiting records captured in Iraq.”
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/09/06/0615_50_startups_need_to_know/31.htm
Palantir keeps it lean and mean on five-year journey from zero to 150 employees
“Palantir Technologies is relatively unknown in Silicon Valley — it keeps a low profile and doesn’t seek much press. But in the five years since its founding, it’s grown to over 150 employees and maintained a very profitable business model.”
Tracking Cyberspies Through the Web Wilderness
New York Times – May 11, 2009
“They uploaded the data into a visualization program that had been provided to the group by Palantir Technologies, a software company that has developed a program that allows investigators to “fuse” large data sets to look for correlations and connections that may otherwise go unnoticed.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/science/12cyber.html
Who’s Behind the Financial Meltdown?
Center for Public Integrity – May 6, 2009
“The heat maps for each of the top 25 subprime lenders were generated using Palantir Government software from Palantir Technologies on the sample of 2005 through 2007 high-interest mortgages from HMDA. This software mapped the census tract of each subprime loan based on the latitude and longitude derived from the mapping files of the U.S. Census Bureau.”
http://www.publicintegrity.org/investigations/economic_meltdown/data/maps/
China denies cyber hacking
cnn.com – March 30, 2009
“CNN’s John Vause reports on the extensive cyber hacking network which began with an attack on the Dalai Lama’s office.”
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/tech/2009/03/30/vause.china.cyber.espionage.cnn
