Palantir, a company that is not well known

From intelligence services to factories, software that transforms data into a strategic weapon. By Xavier Comtesse and Gauthier Ménard

Founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, Palantir first gained recognition within American intelligence and defense circles. Its name comes from Tolkien – a crystal sphere that allows one to see far, everywhere, and through time, from the famous Lord of the Rings film series . The metaphor is not insignificant. It speaks volumes about the project's ambition: to see far through data.

For a long time, Palantir was a secret company, reserved for government agencies, the military, and organizations able to spend tens of millions of dollars to gain access to its systems.

Since the mid-2010s, and especially since the launch of its Foundry platform in 2017, Palantir has actively turned its attention to private sector companies.

Automotive , aerospace , pharmaceutical , banking, andother giants are now clients. They have mountains of data analyzed that they are unable to use effectively. Not for lack of talent or goodwill, but because this data is hidden, stored in different locations, and therefore often invisible, and was never designed to communicate with each other.

Palantir offers a three-step solution:

1. Connect the data

The Foundry platform begins by ingesting all of an organization's data sources, regardless of their format, origin, or age. It cleans, harmonizes, and organizes them according to what Palantir calls an "ontology": a model that represents the company's real world as knowledge graphs (objects, properties, relationships). An airplane. A supplier. An order. A factory. And the links that connect them.

2. To make the invisible visible

Once the data is unified and structured, Foundry enables the building of dashboards, internal applications, and workflows that give each team a clear, real-time view of what's happening. A factory operator sees the performance of their production line. A purchasing manager sees the status of their supply chain. A finance director sees the impact of each operational decision on their margins.

3. Read between the lines

This isn't surface-level artificial intelligence (AI) like ChatGPT . This is deep, operational AI. It won't just read data, but see through it. It will highlight the "unknown-unknown." That makes all the difference.

Today, one might ask how SMEs , particularly in Switzerland, which cannot afford Palantir's services, will be able to withstand such a competitive advantage. Because thoroughly understanding the competition, customers, internal expertise, development projects, supply chains, and so on, objectively gives you a position of strength. In short, that's Palantir's offering: crush the competition with knowledge!

* In computer science , ontology is the representation of knowledge through knowledge graphs structured around relationships and functions. Make no mistake, this ontology truly represents the ultimate advancement of the information society.

By Xavier Comtesse and Gauthier Ménard