The company named after the magic stone that sees everything - and slowly drives mad whoever looks into it.
The name comes from Tolkien - the palantiri are the magic stones from 'The Lord of the Rings', through which you can see everything happening far away, but which slowly bend the will of whoever looks into them too long. It was founded by Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal, later an investor with enormous political influence in the US) together with four others, including the philosopher by training Alex Karp, who is still CEO today. The first money came from the CIA - the company was built directly for intelligence work, it didn't happen later.
Foundry is the main product. Every large organization keeps its data scattered - across different systems, different formats, different departments that don't talk to each other. Foundry gathers it in one place and makes it traceable: which document, which sensor, which report comes from which database, linked on one map. It's not a database. It's more of a skeleton that everything else sits on.
AIP is the newer layer - artificial intelligence built directly into Foundry. It lets an analyst ask the data in plain language, and the system builds an automated process on its own that used to take a team of programmers. This is where the money comes in: in 2026 Palantir reports record revenue growth, with US revenue jumping over 100% - largely thanks to AIP contracts with the federal government.
And here's the controversial part. ICE - the agency that arrests and deports immigrants in the US - pays Palantir about 30 million dollars for a platform called ImmigrationOS, which tracks people's movement in real time. Another of its tools, ELITE, compiles files with an address and a 'trust score' for every potential deportee, with some of the data coming from the health system - it's been revealed that an agreement gives ICE access to the data of nearly 80 million people registered in Medicaid, the US health insurance program for the poor.
Organizations like ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation say the same tools are already used not only against undocumented immigrants, but also to track protesting citizens. Palantir denies building a 'unified database' to watch everyone - but doesn't deny it's building everything such a database could be plugged into within an hour. The company responds publicly to every such report, point by point, but never stops the contract.