💰 $100mn State Department; 300,000 hereos; Bank Run | Palantir Bullets #17
This week's Palantir developments and the crowned “Tweet of the Week”
Editor: Emanuele Marabella
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PLTR 0.00%↑ this week:
Palantir wins a $99.6mn deal over five years with the US State Department. The goal is to improve the Bureau's ability to react swiftly to global crises and better protect the diplomatic workforce and their families. thanks to a platform called Axiom. Palantir first began working with the State Department in 2017, supporting HIV/AIDS analysis for the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) through the Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator and Health Diplomacy.
Palantir has pulled out of the debate with FoxGlove, the activist organization that seeks to prevent Palantir from achieving the $480mn NHS deal. No official communication is provided.
Merck has launched the first Open-Source Library for Palantir Foundry on GitHub. This means the code developed by Merck will be available to use by all Palantir Foundry Developers worldwide. Open source is crucial to unleashing collaboration and stimulating developers to build on Foundry, which is a critical component to making Foundry viral. Merck is a Palantir client since 2017 and is surely one of the biggest commercial partners since they developed 2 vertical platforms with Palantir (PLTR Platforms Unleash Network Effects).
“This library represents a step change in the Developer Experience (DevX) for programmers on Foundry. It is a significant milestone – started as a customer-driven, open-source project – hopefully the first of many examples.”- Shyam Sankar, Palantir CTO
Shyam, Palantir CTO, wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal underscoring that Ukraine is showing the world how wartime can produce the software necessary to win the fight. Interestingly he mentioned:
After Ukraine wins, there will be 300,000 war heroes who happen to be computer scientists. They will be as comfortable wielding Javelins as Jupyter notebooks. I can’t wait to see what they build. - Shyam Sankar, Palantir CTO
Jacobs's CEO officially praised Palantir’s Foundry on Bloomberg Businessweek for having enhanced worker productivity by 50%. Remember: free marketing is the key to virality.
Palantir faces pullback in Germany over data privacy concerns, the Financial Times reports (link). As we covered previously (Palantir Bullets #6) this is a regulatory issue for how the legislation is written, but should not pose a real risk to Palantir as its solutions demonstrated important achievements: helped foil a 2018 Islamist terrorist attack, uncover a pedophile ring in 2020, and even a recent coup, according to the last earnings call. Palantir disclosed that its software can be flexibly adapted to new legal frameworks thanks to its high configurability, therefore it embraces a clarification of the regulation. Palantir’s most adverse Equity Analyst obviously commented:
“That felt to me like they’re throwing in the towel on Europe…companies don’t just throw in the towel because of macro[economic factors] . . . privacy [concerns] could be part of that.”- Tyler Radke, Citi Equity Analyst
Alex Karp participated at Ceraweek, an event organized by S&P Global. During the interview, Bob Dudley, former CEO and President of BP, shared:
“I was faced with everybody wanting this Palantir. There was a demand pool, so we had to prioritize it. But I have to say Palantir revolutionized BP and BP bought 1% of Palantir to align what we were doing.” - Bob Dudley, former BP CEO
You can find the full interview below.
Related Tech trends/Macro:
Kerrisdale Capital publishes a short report on C3 AI. C3 is accused of deceiving and misleading investors and clients about its AI capabilities and the actual health of its most important business relationship with Baker Hughes. The report offers some precious details to better understand Palantir. You can find my reaction to the full report in the video below.
“If you’re a Baker Hughes salesperson, you have no idea how to sell against Palantir or Quantum Black [McKinsey]. You are used to selling to refineries.”- former C3 sales executive
Silicon Valley Bank, a top 20 bank with ~$200bn assets, fails in two days, posing a risk to the startup ecosystem. Will Palantir be affected? We still don’t know, but we know Peter Thiel promptly advised the companies of his portfolio to run off SVB a couple of days before the collapse. So far, according to the released 8-k fillings (link) we have no evidence Palantir is impacted.
