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Palantir raises $680M
- josephjrobison 11y agoData 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.
- argonaut 11y agoEveryone in tech knows about Palantir.
- personjerry 11y agoSoon Palantir will also know about everyone in tech.
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoWell considering what their software actually does...yeah they most likely do in a data set somewhere.
- argonaut 11y agoConsidering what their software actually does, which is basically displaying a dashboard of nice tables / visualizations / graphs, and knobs to turn those visualizations/graphs, no. Palantir barely does any machine learning.
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoSeems like you'd NOT want to do machine learning if you simply want to hold all of the data parent mentioned...
- drcode 11y agoI don't know, I'm not seeing a "sleeping giant" here... Plantir has been around for a long time already at this point- Getting an additional cash infusion, especially one so small for a company of Palantir's size, sounds like the move of a company that is struggling.
- huntermonk 11y agoI see what Joseph is saying about that macro trend. In Austin, RideScout (Kayak.com for transportation options) just sold for ~$100m to Daimler AG with only tens of thousands of user. The importance to Daimler was seeing all the driving and traveling data for each user.
- fluxic 11y agoYou're a couple of orders of magnitude off, my friend.
- amatix 11y agonumber of users? price? which direction?
- fluxic 11y agoprice.
- huntermonk 11y agoAh ok - that's what I heard through Capital Factory. However, I can't imagine it would be more than 2 (you said a couple) orders of magnitude off. Do you know approximately what the amount was?
- duaneb 11y agoThey are sleeping in the sense that they go under the radar of most of the public in spite of being massively influential.
- 11y ago
- hyperbovine 11y ago> Data is the oil of the 21st century. Interesting. So you're saying we'll reach "peak data" in about 100 years?
- paulddraper 11y agoWell, we'll keep getting better and better at extracting more worthwhile data, and increase our ability to use the data we have. And data will allow extensive growth (of business). It might be reaching, but yes, kinda.
- joshmn 11y agoThere's only so much to know. What's more important is what we do with it, and how we apply it.
- alex_hirner 11y agoInteresting 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).
- jacquesm 11y agoThe SF term is 'computronium'.
- josephjrobison 11y agoI think like oil, we'll keep finding new ways to dig deeper and get more out of it through innovations and new technologies, don't you agree?
- sremani 11y agoI disagree with the analogy. Human population will not grow from 1 billion to 7 billion because of data, that is the kind of change we got with oil. Oil is a hard asset, data is not entirely hard asset.
- wbc 11y agocan you explain how oil enabled human pop to go from 1b to 7b?
- mchaver 11y agoNot sure why you are getting down voted. It's a valid question. Cheap, abundant energy makes in cheaper to produce and transport necessities for human life and allows us to invest more time into researching and improving the quality and availability of those necessities (food, clothing, housing, medicine, etc.). Haven't read through all of this, but it seems to have some similar ideas. http://www.resilience.org/stories/2009-04-20/peak-people-interrelationship-between-population-growth-and-energy-resources http://www.resilience.org/stories/2009-04-20/peak-people-int...
- dnissley 11y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
- angry_octet 11y agoIndustrial fertiliser and transport, plastics, energy, etc.
- sawwit 11y agoThe snake oil?
- adenadel 11y agoAccording to Crunchbase this is the 17th round of funding. That seems insane to me.
- jsprogrammer 11y agoYou don't let your key spy software company fold up.
- onion2k 11y agoSeries Q. Quite appropriate in a James Bond spy movie kind of way.
- MaxScheiber 11y agoTo be clear, they raised $129M in this exact round of funding, which complements $550M previously raised in 2015.
- bane 11y agoThey 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-technologies#/entity https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/palantir-technologie...
- nthitz 11y agoCan anyone please give a non-vague answer to what Palantir does?
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoAs someone who has worked with Palantir and used their products in various, indirect and proxy contexts it gets confusing as to what you can talk about and what you can't depending on god knows what 15 papers you signed to be on the contract which has access to Palantir. I suspect this is a big part of why people don't talk about it much and why their website is so incredibly vague and, honestly, really terrible at explaining what they do. I found this Quora question and answer which ultimately doesn't really describe what I have interfaced with before https://www.quora.com/What-specifically-does-Palantir-do https://www.quora.com/What-specifically-does-Palantir-do. Perhaps I simply didn't interact with that part of the product. Sorry for the semi vague and terrible answer. Briefly looking at some of these videos may be of help as it shows Palantir and other software doing some sort of entity extraction from documents https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NAVSyfjcDo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NAVSyfjcDo
- nimrody 11y agoThanks for the video link. This video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVsx4I8gkKk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVsx4I8gkKk is very impressive.
- hendzen 11y agoPalantir 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.
- unixhero 11y agoPardon my ignorance. But at a funding level of USD680M, isn't it more prudent to do an IPO?
- loosescrews 11y agoThey don't seem to think that is a good idea: http://www.cnbc.com/2014/03/19/free-advice-dont-go-public-says-palantirs-ceo.html http://www.cnbc.com/2014/03/19/free-advice-dont-go-public-sa...
- nova22033 11y ago>best known for helping the U.S. government track down al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden Is this true?
- discodave 11y agoWhy 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.
- ryporter 11y agoI 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.)
- adventured 11y agoHow do you know Atlassian has a much more scalable business, without knowing the specific details of Palantir's business operations, its growth rate, its profitability, its revenue, etc? Besides, what's bigger than spying and gathering data on citizens these days? Governments around the world are allocating increasingly vast sums of money to it. It's certainly a drastically larger business opportunity than Atlassian's $319m in sales (after 13 years). Governments are not going to spend less on what Palantir does, they're going to spend a lot more, and then after that they're going to spend a lot more. What would it be worth to be one of the principle software contractors for the US Government for the next 20 years, and perhaps the five eyes in general? How about a $60 billion market cap like some of the other big defense contractors? Why not... that's the age we're entering.
- sgt 11y agoI 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.
- loosescrews 11y agoI don't know about the databases, but I know they use a lot of Java. I think they might have their own database.
- MasterScrat 11y agoFor frontend they use TypeScript: https://www.palantir.com/2013/12/announcing-three-open-source-projects-for-developing-with-typescript/ https://www.palantir.com/2013/12/announcing-three-open-sourc...
- oliv__ 11y agoHaha first time in a while that I see a link to yahoo.com on the front page. Marissa is that you?