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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.