Riding explosive customer demand that spiked Q2 revenue 48% and pushed Q3 growth expectations to 50%, Palantir has blasted its way into the Cloud Wars Top 10 on the power of its first billion-dollar quarter and its insistence on prioritizing purpose-built customer outcomes over dated industry-analyst boxes.
Founded in 2004, Palantir spent its first dozen years working primarily with federal agencies before branching into the private sector about 10 years ago. And as the AI Revolution has kicked into high gear over the past couple of years, business customers have made Palantir one of the world’s hottest companies.
I’ll offer some eye-popping details in a moment but first I strongly encourage you to check out this video interview I recorded late last week with Palantir’s Chad Wahlquist, who does an excellent job of outlining the company’s intense focus on business outcomes, its perfect alignment with the AI-powered priorities of today’s business leaders, its ability to help businesses operationalize and drive value from their data, and its unique — and I do mean unique — culture that is at the heart of its runaway growth.
Here’s a teaser about one of the many compelling topics Wahlquist tackles in the video interview above: on Palantir’s Q2 earnings call, Chief Revenue Officer Ryan Taylor — who, by the way, is also the company’s Chief Legal Officer, a pairing that I can’t imagine any other tech company has — said this: “LLM’s simply don’t work in the real world without Palantir. That is the reality fueling our growth.” Wahlquist unpacks that jarring declaration elegantly — and for those looking to understand who and what Palantir is, Wahlquist’s explanation is essential.
So Just How Hot Is Palantir?
Plenty of tech companies are doing very well here in the frothy early days of the AI Revolution, but Palantir’s trajectory is simply stunning:
- its market cap is $443 billion, an astonishing figure given the company’s relatively small annualized revenue run rate of $4 billion;
- that market cap is 5.5X higher than that of the excellent company Palantir replaced on the Cloud Wars Top 10 — Snowflake — whose revenue is currently exactly the same as Palantir’s;
- surging customer demand and sky-high growth expectations for Palantir have seen that market cap more than quadruple in the past 12 months;
- while red-hot Snowflake grew its product revenue 32% in its most-recent quarter, that pales in comparison to Palantir’s 48%;
- its U.S. commercial business, which Founder and CEO Alex Karp believes will become Palantir’s core growth engine for years to come, saw its revenue spike 93% to $306 million last quarter;
- and for more insights into Palantir’s runaway growth and some customer testimonials, please see my analysis six weeks ago headlined “Palantir Rides AI Revolution to Astonishing Q2: 21-Year-Old Unicorn“?
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Customer Comments about Working with Palantir
And now as promised, some testimonials from Palantir customers:
HEINEKEN USA: “We had a great chassis of the car. But our engine was underpowered. So we went to Palantir because we want to have the best engine out there … In three months, [the teams] built what took us three years before.” Laurens van de Rotte, Chief Operating Officer
LOWE’S: “In less than four months, we created something from POC all the way to production. Palantir has made us faster and smarter.” Elaina Wheeldon, VP Data Products, Applied AI, & Analytics
WALGREENS: “We started with the goal of piloting 10 stores within about six months. However, leveraging Foundry and AIP, we began to see real promise quickly in composing AI-powered, end-to-end workflows that allowed us to get to about 4,000 stores within eight months.” Jeff Hoffman, VP Product Pharmacy
SOMPO: “So, what was the impact? Over the last three years, we have seen a $60 million improvement in profit. And we expect an additional $100M over the next three years.” Akiko Murakami, Sompo, Chief Technology Officer
TAMPA GENERAL HOSPITAL: “Palantir is going to be front and center for everything that we do … [the platform] is a strategic differentiator for us.” John Couris, CEO
LENNAR: “It was totally quiet for 14 minutes. People were just in awe. All total hell broke loose, because people completely couldn’t believe what they had seen.” Scott Spradley, Chief Technology Officer
WENDY’S QUALITY SUPPLY CHAIN CO-OP: “Now, we’ve not only fixed our inventory problem, we’ve now taken a problem that would go on for weeks and days and fixed it in five minutes, making our people incredibly efficient.” Pete Suerken, President & CEO
Final Thought
While I’m thrilled about the chance to begin analyzing Palantir and the remarkable results it’s generating for customers — you’ll find several examples below — I regret the need to say ‘so long’ to Snowflake, an outstanding company whose financial results and growth potential have been excellent. My decision to bring Palantir into the Cloud Wars Top 10 and move Snowflake out has nothing to do with any shortcoming on Snowflake’s part, but rather everything to do with Palantir performing at an even higher level and offering an even more-powerful example of why the Cloud Wars are the greatest growth market the world has ever known.
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