At least when I worked there, Palantir would have been best described as a data visualization and integration company. The TL;DR: of what they do if they take i

At least when I worked there, Palantir would have been best described as a data visualization and integration company. The TL;DR: of what they do if they take in data from multiple crufty government [1] databases and put them in a format that makes it easier to analyze and and make correlations between things that would have otherwise been strewn about disparate government records. They also build a desktop client to view this data. That's what Palantir Gotham is. I don't really know what Palantir Metropolis is, apparently it's supposed to more about visualizing quantitative data. [1] I think they also offer these services to private companies now.