That was my reading as well - Techcrunch essentially reprinted marketing materials as incontrovertible fact for this story (continuing a long tradition of similar journalistic excellence). One particularly troublesome sentence:
"...[Palantir] is capable of building comprehensive models of activity to detect suspicious anomalies and is even able to provide immunity to fraud thanks to strategies the founders learned while still at PayPal."
Well there's an objective, accurate statement. Even Paypal itself is far from "immune to fraud". Palantir appears to be doing some interesting things, but this article is ridiculous.
It is more of an "under moderation" thing than a "dead" thing. It's on our list to make that explicit and to provide a mechanism for the community to make most of the moderation decisions.
I'm not sure I can think of many software companies with that kind of startup investment.
WP says they have about 1,200 employees, or a burn rate of about $300m/yr. Those figures are old, so this new round must be for another year of operations.
I believe I had heard in a previous discussion that they were planning on going public in 2015, so this is a bit of a surprise.
Last I heard they were still also a Java client application for the analytics. They appear to have had an HTML5 client in development several years ago, but that doesn't appear to be the current product (even videos as new as a month old still use the old client which they had up as a free demo for years on their site). [1][2]
So is this just for continued expansion or is Palantir some kind of hi-tech charity case people prop with more money than sense continue to prop up? My guess is the former, but there's some arguments it's really the second.
I've heard this as well. They essentially hire customer-facing engineers to go out and scope specific contracts and literally implement custom solutions with small generic software frameworks they developed in house.
On the other hand, the customer has results after 6-8 weeks. How much software can really be built in that sort of time frame? Not much...
In my opinion Palantir is a product company, but the product is deeply integrated in to an enterprise. And doing that takes time and people.
I don't see how you can simplify that into calling it a "dev framework".
Fair enough. But you may be underestimating the value of production-quality fast-development dev frameworks in enterprise.
Remember, these are guys who are used to seeing 5-year project timelines for anything that touches more than one system. (And every business case touches more than one system...)
One other thing to note is that while they build these custom solutions, the second you touch their stuff that support policy goes out the window, not unlike what Oracle does.
EDIT: n/m @dang answered this indirectly a couple of comments below.
To be fair, this description makes it sound like an ETL tool, just like Ab Initio, Datastage or Teradata, where the companies involved all make serious amounts of money from consulting (and the server licenses don't come cheap either!).
These tools can be pretty powerful if set up and programmed correctly; it's definitely not as simple as pointing them at a bunch of data sources and expecting magic to happen.
If Palantir haven't found a magic way to integrate data sources without any configuration, it does sound rather deceptive.
That said, if they manage to get systems up and running without 30-stories-high stacks of never-to-be-read paper, that'd be a revolution in itself.
I work with Palantir guys and helping them with data sources at a large banking firm.
Everything is custom, needs to be customized and then it needs to be changed every month.
The magic bullet here is hard work and smart people.
Palantir hires young smart (but not street smart) Ivy league engineers that have no clue how actual enterprise software works ... much like the founders and management team of Palantir.
Not always. A lot of software companies that provide enterprise-level software but aren't the SAPs and Oracles of the world often supply in-house implementors, who work for weeks or months with customers to integrate those products into existing system (at a cost).
NSA as a customer has been widely reported in popular press [1].
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/agent-o...
edit: and I'm a Libertarian, so I'm biased against reaching this conclusion based on my own observations.
A: No, the CIA is a front for Palantir.
- Peter Thiel
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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.
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.
To be continued...