Copy paste of Joe_Doe's comment. Which seems dead but sais "[noobtor]" instead of [dead]. Never seen that before?! However should he have registered via tor to leak a bit of insider info I don't want to let this die because of tor flagging.<p>----------<p>Palantir is trying to raise another ~400mm to finance their operations. And I honestly think this just another PR stunt to attract investors. The 'secretive' attitude is just a game of deception. They are deceiving investors into believing that the company has a real product. However if you talk to any FDE or Embedded Analyst, you'll immediately realize that this is a consulting company. Which should be valued at far lower multiple than a real product company.<p>Every new contract requires dozen extra people...That's why they are on a hire spree right now, (because of a large 'consulting' contract with a an oil company, that should stay unamed). However, with oil trading at 50s, they are scared and they trying to get some cash to cushion a possible contract cancellation.<p>To be continued...
Palantir is trying to raise another ~400mm to finance their operations. And I honestly think this just another PR stunt to attract investors.
The 'secretive' attitude is just a game of deception. They are deceiving investors into believing that the company has a real product. However if you talk to any FDE or Embedded Analyst, you'll immediately realize that this is a consulting company. Which should be valued at far lower multiple than a real product company.<p>Every new contract requires dozen extra people...That's why they are on a hire spree right now, (because of a large 'consulting' contract with a an oil company, that should stay unamed).
However, with oil trading at 50s, they are scared and they trying to get some cash to cushion a possible contract cancellation.<p>To be continued...
This sounds more like a leaked Palantir press release; but then again, that's pretty much what a prospectus is.<p>> "It’s the combination of every analytical tool you could ever dream of."<p>> The Pentagon used the software to track patterns in roadside bomb deployment and was able to conclude that garage-door openers were being used as remote detonators.<p>> With Palantir, the Marines are now able to upload DNA samples from remote locations and tap into information gathered from years of collecting fingerprints and DNA evidence<p>> The leaked document cites a 2012 study where 96% of the surveyed war fighters in Afghanistan recommended Palantir.
Check out their SEC filings:
<a href="http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001321655" rel="nofollow">http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CI...</a><p>Insiders are selling shares to private wealth management firms / asset management firms. It's amazing how much hype can do in the private finance world when you have the perception of momentum and herd mentality. Look at Clinkle raising $30mm ... this is the same thing happening at a bigger scale. Look at Groupon... same thing.<p>Here's one to S F Sentry Securities, Inc.
<a href="http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1321655/000132165514000004/xslFormDX01/primary_doc.xml" rel="nofollow">http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1321655/0001321655140...</a><p>Morgan Stanley took over $25mm in fees to arrange these sales... the reason for that is because they know that there is no way Palantir is going to have an IPO in the near future -- or else they would be salivating to do this kind of transaction for free to gain favor with management.<p>The fundamental problem with Palantir is that they are a government contractor masquerading as a product company. $200mm in government contracts comes with enough overhead that there is not a ton of margin. You can see tons of defense contractors in the midwest doing hundreds of millions in revenue.<p>Take a look at their revenue numbers for federal government (which is likely a major portion of their ~$420mm in revenue):
<a href="http://goo.gl/v7JzT5" rel="nofollow">http://goo.gl/v7JzT5</a>
<a href="http://goo.gl/AzZeuR" rel="nofollow">http://goo.gl/AzZeuR</a>
Nothing too interesting revealed in the document. Here is a video of the LAPD talking about more specific uses of Palantir,<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJ-u7yDwC6g" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJ-u7yDwC6g</a><p>Here is an interesting video from them talking about data analysis of Iranian arms deals used to show off some of their tools used by the intelligence community<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FX0gwNU3WBI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FX0gwNU3WBI</a>
I consider them closer to SAP than the usual DC area style contracting company. What does distinguish them from most of the companies in the area though is that their product tends to work and scale somewhat which I can't say for the vast majority of government contractor produced software for the government at their (very, very schizophrenic and oftentimes misleading) direction. Actually hiring engineers that can codifies instead of asking for a clearance first makes a monumental difference in how you structure your company and lines of business. It lets you at least create a working project first because you can actually reject most of your candidates instead of being pressured to due to being jerked around by the terms of the contract requiring certain levels of clearance first. The government isn't run by completely retarded people and they're seeing now how it's probably easier to have actual software companies produce software and then go through the integration and compliance paperwork later - it's how GovCloud fundamentally became an option in Intelligence Community projects. You thought the Terremark cloud was one nobody used that's terribly overpriced? Wait until you see the "clouds" the big defense contractors came up with at orders of magnitude more dollars (most of it probably going to compensate those poor people filing documents and paperwork meant to protect the government but now entrapping it to work primarily with parasitic companies).<p>Look online for people with DCGS on their profiles, you'll be able to trace it all back to trying to reproduce Palantir down to the web GUI. Some decent journalist should be able to piece a lot together if they just trolled LinkedIn. A lot of it is unclassified but technically FOUO so not quite cleared for public consumption. The reason I figure it hasn't been researched thoroughly is because it's extremely boring DC area "tech" news that is more about topics that are of little interest to the tech community and is boring even by DC tech standards. Almost every company here is some Big Data bullshit company that's writing something about 8 - 14 years behind private industry timelines from an engineering standpoint and held back by politics, funding, and sheer disorganization endemic to enterprises but especially bad in the bloated Pentagon budget.
Reads like the intro to "Person of Interest". This capability has been on the 'want list' for ARPA forever, and I first heard about it as the "total information awareness" program. Mining deep sources of periodic data can be very very enlightening with respect to people's activity. Too bad these guys aren't subject to federal oversight with respect to personal privacy rights.
These guys? <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/02/11/palantir-apologizes-for-wikileaks-attack-proposal-cuts-ties-with-hbgary/" rel="nofollow">http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/02/11/palanti...</a><p>Well they apologised, I guess. No resignations, no charges, no referring evidence to police. But yeah, they did apologise for it, so they got that going for them.
I'm kind of surprised that TechCrunch acts like Palantir's role was never out in the open - if anyone ever browsed a job opening there for engineering, they have you check out a tool that steps through using the product to uncover the 9/11 attackers in a mock but plausible scenario. It is very obvious what their role is for intelligence analysis.
I have a friend that works here. Apparently the job interview process is tough. Very technical. Tons of questions involving algorithms. I'm tempted to apply just for the challenge.<p>The perks are nice. They have an onsite chef so you can have a catered meal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Apparently a masseuse comes in every month(?) or so for free massages. Seems like a nice gig for the programmers.
TechCrunch: "Look, guys, we just totally randomly found this document that says how <i>awesome</i> Palantir is. The document about the negatives was lost due to water damage".
Honestly, I don't understand the excitement over this. For all the conspiracy theories, Palantir is pretty open about their basic work. Their website is pretty vacuous, but that's not shocking for what is essentially enterprise software. They had (have?) a fairly comprehensive "try it out" tool on their site, and give example-based demos at a host of college campuses.<p>All of this indicates that there's no big mystery here - they built a relationship-analysis tool that doesn't suck horribly. When you're selling to banks and the government, "actually works as promised" is rare enough to make you a billion dollar company.<p>Palantir is more hush-hush about some of their work, though this seems to be more 'competitive advantage' and less 'military secrets'. New initiatives and project restructuring are kept fairly quiet, and their customer lists are obviously secret, but none of this is shocking.<p>TechCrunch seems to have discovered what looks like a 'secret' press release about how great Palantir is, and it's being spun as dark secrets instead of info that any Palantir employee or tech talk is happy to divulge.
All of these comments couldn't be more correct.<p>The only question I have is how could investors be this dumb?<p>I have heard that some investors in the prior round (all of what, 12-18 months ago?) are trying to get some/all their money out after seeing the curtain pulled back. It has to be somewhat of a stampede for the door gaining momentum.<p>Still, while it is a cushy place to work (smart people, nice perks, okay money and stock that is supposedly valuable on paper until everyone rushes for the door), I also don't understand why smart people work there - unless they don't.<p>Maybe the smart employees are the ones who left 2-3 years ago.
Ah, the Paypal mafia at it again. Well atleast they're bringing the money to the valley. Funny how a lot of Libertarian Thiel's companies are funded by govt. contracts. Same goes for Elon.
A more interesting journalistic question would be: why does an 10-year-old software company with existing products, paying customers and an international presence need yet another $400m?
It lets people without analytics know-how type a query in human language and target killer drones on result set? Do they at least have Palantir False Positives Victim fund?
The article reads to me as very credulous; I can't imagine a piece like this running in TechCrunch in the good ol' days with Arrington at the helm.
All watched over by machines of loving grace. Just like here on HN where algorithms take care of people using Tor or links that get too many votes too fast.
It is a bit ironic that Peter Thiel is backing Palantir, and is the biggest investor in the marijuana trade. They seem like opposite ends of the spectrum.
First screenshot shows a system running Windows XP. Not a good sign that a product serving such confidential information is running on an operating system no longer supported with security patches.