The Real-World Importance of Palantir's Software
Alex Karp Has Been Proven Right About a World in Chaos, Needing Palantir
How Palantir Deals with Russia Ukraine Conflict: Feature Video
The Fog of War
The “fog of war” is the fact that war is inherently volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. Everything that can go wrong, does go wrong. It's unclear what exactly is happening, what needs to happen, and how to act to ensure that it does.
Whether you're an investor, fan, or looking to learn more about the company, Palantir will be the focus of this analysis and has been building software for the last two decades to deal with the fog of war.
And as per current events with the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, more eyes are landing on Palantir, the company and its software.
Drawing a Line in the Sand
In his 2022 annual letter CEO Dr. Karp explained how Palantir has a worldview since its founding of future global instability beyond where it stands by saying:
We build software to ensure the survival of our most vital institutions. And we succeed only if and when those institutions do.
In a recent letter addressing Russia's invasion of Ukraine, CEO Alex Karp said:
Our software is in the fight around the world. We need an allied technology industry in Europe to step up and fight this battle alongside us in order to win.
This, of course, in reference to Palantir's decision to work solely with the West and its allies.
Gotham: Explained
Gotham is one of Palantir's three bat signals: Palantir's platform for decision-making in global defense while maintaining privacy and access controls. It is an AI-enabled data solution designed to integrate, manage, secure, and analyze real-time data that enables users to make more informed decisions. Gotham can be used to integrate structured and unstructured data that is typically stored in disconnected systems. As it flows into the platform, the data is enriched and mapped into defined objects and relationships to surface critical insights.
Gotham is structured around objects and links between them. Its underlying model is, fundamentally, a graph and describes and explores properties of relationships between objects that represent real-world people, places, and things. Gotham supports top-down and bottom-up analysis by integrating data from any number of systems and presenting it in multiple visual formats, enabling analysts to produce actionable intelligence based on the full ecosystem of available data.
Ultimately, the platform helps organizations combine, protect, and analyze large chunks of data. Gotham operates as an organization's knowledge base so that users can start analyzing data from multiple sources, implement it into a human-centric model, and bring it to life for human-driven analysis, and do so fast with rapid time to value.
Palantir's main clients are big organizations including the US government and other liberal democracies.
I've found a few sources to learn more on Gotham which you likely haven't ever seen before, check them out:
Effects on the Core Business
Germany is set to increase defense spending in response to current conflicts to the tune of a hundred billion. NATO and allies already know Palantir so with only a couple percent of its stated government TAM in its S1 filing, there is a real possibility for the acceleration of long term defense spending that could be a tailwind for this company and to stop the slowdown in the rate of government business growth that we have seen most recently in this image below: