QV Alert – Palantir, Wow! Wow! Wow!

Cometh the hour, cometh the man!

Our foundational investments in ontology and infrastructure have positioned us to uniquely deliver on AI demand.

From the beginning, AIP [artificial intelligence platform] was built for this reality. Chat was always a dead end. Instead, we viewed LLMs [large language models] as a new runtime for the AI labor; to capture the productive value of this AI labor, you need an intermediate representation of your enterprise that AI can actually interact with. How do you allocate inventory, onboard customers, process claims, call for prior authorisation, and the like? That intermediary representation that makes all of that possible is ontology*, and that’s why it’s been the secret to our meteoric rise.

*I have been looking for a layman’s explanation of ontology. Unfortunately the explanations are as baffling as the use of the word. It’s a magic ingredient but what the magic is, God knows. Maybe we should content ourselves with Palantir’s explanation above.

Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer, Palantir, Q4 2024, 3 February 2025

The company could not be happier about the progress they are making.

2024 was nothing short of incredible for Palantir. Our momentum accelerated through year end, closing out 2024 with exceptional Q4 results, including an extraordinary top-line beat and outperformance led by our U.S. business.

Ryan Taylor, CFO, Palantir, Q4 2024, 3 February 2025

Saying the business is on fire hardly does justice to what is happening at Palantir.

With the proliferation of AI models, the raw AI labor supply is exploding. While everyone else is focused on the model supply side, we’re transforming AI into a measurable stream of high-value finished goods and services. The result, the rapid emergence of quantified exceptionalism for organizations able to unlock the potential of these commoditised models through AIP. A byproduct of our incredible progress, our Rule of 40 score increased to 81 in the fourth quarter. It’s a substantial leap to deploy LLMs into production with real impact.

Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer (CTO), Palantir, Q4 2024, 3 February 2025

The Rule of 40 is a SaaS financial ratio which states that a healthy SaaS company has a combined growth rate and profit margin of 40pc or more. This measure gives businesses a quick snapshot of business performance by comparing revenue growth to profitability.

Mosaic Technology

Milestones are coming thick and fast for Palantir.

Palantir’s “Warp Speed Cohort” refers to a group of companies participating in a program designed to accelerate their manufacturing capabilities using advanced AI and technology provided by Palantir’s “Warp Speed” platform, which acts as a manufacturing operating system aimed at enhancing speed, flexibility, and security within production processes; the initial cohort includes companies like Anduril Industries, L3Harris, and Panasonic Energy of North America.

Palantir Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ: PLTR) today announced that it has been granted FedRAMP High Authorization for Palantir Federal Cloud Service (PFCS) and Palantir Federal Cloud Service – Supporting Services (PFCS-SS). These authorizations cover the entirety of Palantir’s product offerings and programs—including AIP, Apollo, Foundry, Gotham, FedStart, and Mission Manager—and therefore enable Palantir to provide any of its product offerings to the U.S. Government at the FedRAMP High baseline.

FedRAMP is a government-wide program that promotes the adoption of secure cloud services across the federal government by providing a standardized approach to security and risk assessment for cloud technologies and federal agencies. This High authorization builds on Palantir’s previous FedRAMP Moderate and DoD IL5 and IL6 authorizations, and enables the U.S. government to process the most sensitive unclassified workloads in Palantir’s cloud offering.

Palantir website, news, 3 December 2024

Batshit crazy (his words) CEO, Alex Karp, makes even Elon Musk seem sensible, with his prophecies.

In Palantir’s letter to shareholders, CEO Alex Karp said of AI, “We are still in the earliest stages, the beginning of the first act, of a revolution that will play out over years and decades.”

Shareholder’s letter, Palantir, Q4 2024, 3 February 2025

In another quote I have been unable to track down, Karp said that Palantir was ‘miniscule’ compared to where it was going. It came in an interview with CNBC.

If you want a company to grow fast you want new customers to ramp up their involvement rapidly. This is happening on an explosive scale at Palantir.

Last quarter, U.S. commercial revenue grew 64pc year-over-year and 20pc sequentially. AIP continues to fuel new customer acquisition as we have nearly 5 times the number of U.S. commercial customers as we did three years ago and significant expansion opportunities at existing customers. Organizations who have crossed the chasm with Palantir are driving real impact quickly. In this AI revolution, the biggest risk is not moving fast enough and organizations are looking to us. With Palantir, as soon as work begins, we’re delivering real quantified exceptionalism for our customers.

In my conversations, they’re excitedly asking how we can replicate this success across their organizations. One of America’s largest pharmacies has been a customer since early 2024 and signed a $67m TCV [total contract value] engagement with us right after the pilot for workflows including automatically load-balancing prescription fulfillment and orchestrating patient outreach. An American telecom company became a customer approximately two years ago and recently signed a $40m TCV expansion deal to help manage and accelerate their decommissioning of old network technologies and equipment in order to achieve significant cost savings.

Last earnings call, we mentioned the leading global insurance organization that deployed AIP to help automate underwriting workflows, reducing a two-week process to three hours. That organization signed a nearly $11m ACV [annual contract value] expansion deal in Q4. Panasonic Energy North America is seeing the effects of its AIP expansion as they’ve created a maintenance assistant to help 350 technicians in making 5.5m batteries per day, resulting in reduced machine downtime, greater throughput, and rapid onboarding of new technicians.

Ryan Taylor, CFO, Palantir, Q4 2024, 3 February 2025

Palantir is heading space age with its technology.

We are convinced the normative value for AI is enterprise autonomy, the self-driving company. Users go from performing the workflow to supervising an army of agents, teaching them how to handle edge cases and reducing 12-time, this is where we are maniacally focused with our customers.

12 attoseconds (10-18 s) is the world’s shortest measured timelength.

Shyam Sanker, CTO, Palantir, Q4 2024, 3 February 2025

The results of using the technology are amazing.

We’re working with an automotive supplier to analyze CAD files for component designs to have AI labor validate engineering standards and manufacturability checks. That is a 100-hour process for human engineers, now automated and serving up exceptions for human review. The before and after with AI is stark and the speed of implementation is accelerating. You can divide companies up into two categories, the quick and the dead.

Shyam Sanker, CTO, Palantir, Q4 2024, 3 February 2025

And this is just the beginning.

Turning to Warp Speed, Palantir’s modern American manufacturing operating system, it continues to move at Warp 10. Our nation is in the beginning of a great reindustrialization as we compete with China to secure a free world and individual liberties. This is a competition we cannot afford to lose. We announced our first cohort of Warp Speed customers, including Anduril and L3Harris. The response has been exceptional and the pipeline is swelling. Warp Speed integrates engineering, test, production, quality, and operations so that manufacturers can build better and build faster.

Shyam Sanker, CTO, Palantir, Q4 2024, 3 February 2025

Don’t mess with these guys!

Maven continues to see significant adoption in his path finding new AI capabilities throughout the kill chain. Substantial new investments integrating contested logistics into MAVEN’s AI-enabled kill chain met their moment in exercises in Q4.

Adoption continues within the military departments, specifically Army, Air Force, and Space Force, as well as at the combatant commands with expansions at Spacecom, SOUTHCOM, AFRICOM, and Stratcom. While Hurricane Helene response galvanized the adoption of MAVEN on unclass beyond just the secret and top-secret networks, the adoption has continued to grow as MAVEN is used for securing our nation’s border and securing our nation’s airspace by enabling drone domain awareness.

And MAVEN is reaching our allies and partners via U.S.-supplied capabilities called MAVEN REL, all spurred by real-world events and the need to collaborate in real-time in crisis. We are really just getting started with MAVEN and have an ambitious roadmap and a set of customer opportunities in front of us to deliver the unfair advantage our warfighters deserve.

Shyam Sanker, CTO, Palantir, Q4 2024, 3 February 2025

Karp is so excited you can almost see him fizzing.

This is obviously a very, very special time to be at Palantir. Palantirian’s are very excited and I am — yes, it’s by far the best time to be at Palantir. One of the things that’s crazy important about our time at Palantir now is, it’s actually the vibe internally, the vibe with our clients, the vibe with inside of our products is, we are at the way beginning of our trajectory. We are at the way beginning of revolution and we plan to be a cornerstone, if not the cornerstone company, and driving this revolution in the U.S. over the next three to five years.

Alex Karp, CEO, Palantir, Q4 2024, 3 February 2025

It’s not just Karp who is bat-shit crazy. His company is going batshit crazy too.

Share Recommendations

Palantir. PLTR

The elephant in the room with Palantir is the valuation. I don’t want to say it doesn’t matter because it does. The problem is how to value a company as exciting as Palantir. Number-crunching, what the analysts do, inevitably leads to furrowed brows but that is what happens with companies leading a revolution. Google in 2004, when the company first floated, looked insanely expensive. Since then the shares have risen, not 100 times but they are heading in that direction.

Sometimes it is all about a leap of faith. Karp thinks his company is going to become gigantic. All you have to do is believe him.