What Does Palantir Do? Products, Customers, and Business Model

Palantir Technologies is a US software company that builds platforms for integrating an organization's data, modeling it as an ontology of real-world objects and actions, and running decisions and AI on top of that model. Founded in 2003, it sells four core platforms: Gotham for defense and intelligence agencies, Foundry for commercial and civil operations, AIP for large language models and AI agents, and Apollo for delivering software to any environment. Government and commercial customers each supply about half of its revenue: in the quarter ended June 30, 2026, Palantir reported $990 million from government customers and $945 million from commercial customers, out of $1.935 billion. Palantir does not sell data, and its 2025 annual report states, "We are not in the business of collecting, mining, or selling data."

This page is the overview, and each product has its own deep dive linked below. Every figure links to the filing or announcement it came from. Facts are current as of October 2026, when the most recent quarter Palantir had reported was the one ended June 30, 2026.

Palantir's products and services at a glance

Palantir sells a small set of platforms that share one ontology and one delivery layer, plus offerings built for specific buyers that run on or alongside those platforms. The table lists each current offering, what it does, who buys it, and how it is deployed.

Two points in the table are easy to miss. Commercial buyers get AIP as part of a Foundry deployment, so a commercial AIP decision is a Foundry decision. And the offerings in the lower rows are aimed at one kind of buyer each, which is why a software vendor, a manufacturer, and a combatant command can all be Palantir customers without using the same product.

The ontology is the common core

Every Palantir platform rests on the ontology, Palantir's model of an organization as typed objects, the links between them, and the actions that change them. Palantir's documentation calls it "the digital twin of an organization." An object type might be a customer, an aircraft, an insurance claim, or a suspect. A link type records that a claim belongs to a policy. An action type defines a governed change, such as approving that claim, with validation rules and an audit record.

The ontology explains how one company sells into such different markets. Gotham applied the model to intelligence data, and Palantir's patent on storing data against an ontology traces to a November 2006 filing. Foundry applied the same model to commercial operations. AIP uses it to give language models structured, permission-filtered context and a governed way to act. Apollo keeps all of it running and current across environments. Our Foundry guide covers the ontology layer in detail.

What is Palantir AI?

Palantir's AI product is AIP, the Artificial Intelligence Platform, which Palantir launched in April 2023. The 2025 10-K describes AIP as Palantir's generative AI platform: it provides secure connectivity to third-party large language models, tools for building AI agents and automations, and an evaluations framework for governing AI workflows in production. Palantir's AIP page summarizes the pitch as the ability to "Run LLMs and other models on your private network with full control."

Inside Foundry, AIP shows up as named tools. AIP Logic builds LLM-powered functions without code, AIP Chatbot Studio (formerly AIP Agent Studio) builds assistants grounded in ontology data, AIP Evals tests prompts and functions against defined cases, and AIP Assist helps builders inside the platform, according to Palantir's AIP documentation, which also covers bringing your own model. The design choice that matters is grounding: an AIP agent reads typed, permission-filtered objects and acts through the same action types a human operator uses, so its changes are validated and logged the same way. Our AIP guide covers what teams build first and how to measure it.

How does Palantir make money?

Palantir makes money by selling subscriptions to its software platforms, usually under multi-year contracts, to government agencies and commercial companies. It reports revenue in two segments, government and commercial, and discloses US results separately. The table draws on the Q2 2026 earnings release, the Form 10-Q for that quarter, the Q4 2025 earnings release, and the 2025 Form 10-K.

Two patterns stand out. Commercial revenue is catching up with government revenue: the commercial segment produced 49 percent of revenue in the June 2026 quarter, up from 45 percent a year earlier, driven by US commercial growth of 149 percent. And the business is concentrated in the United States, which produced 81 percent of revenue in that quarter.

A worked example shows what those numbers mean for a buyer's budget. Palantir ended 2025 with 954 customers, a count that grew 34 percent during the year, against $4.475 billion of revenue. Dividing one by the other gives about $4.7 million per customer, and the true average is higher because the customer count was lower for most of the year. In the June 2026 quarter alone, Palantir closed 220 deals of at least $1 million. Those averages describe a base weighted toward large government programs and enterprise-wide deployments, and they are a poor guide to a first commercial contract, which BD Emerson typically sees starting in the low to mid six figures a year for a single use case. Our guide to what Palantir costs breaks down the variables.

Who uses Palantir?

Palantir's customers are large government bodies and large companies, and there are relatively few of them: 954 at the end of 2025 for $4.475 billion of revenue. Palantir names some customers itself, and many customers announce their own deployments. The table lists public examples by sector.

Government users, and the civil liberties debate around them, are covered in our Palantir Gotham guide.

How does Palantir sell?

Palantir sells directly, puts its own engineers on a customer's data early, and grows accounts once a first workflow proves itself. Its 2020 S-1 described this as its "Acquire, Expand, and Scale business model," and the motions below are how that model works today. The right-hand column is BD Emerson's view of what each motion means for the buyer.

How do buyers engage Palantir?

Buyers contract for the software and then choose who does the implementation work: Palantir's own engineers, an internal team, an independent implementation firm, or a combination. Government buyers sometimes reach Palantir through prime contractors: the Army's 2025 agreement consolidated 75 contracts, including 60 in which Palantir was a subcontractor, as Breaking Defense reported. The implementation choice matters because the license is rarely the largest cost in year one. Somebody has to connect source systems, build pipelines, design the ontology, build applications, configure security, and change how operators work, and that effort is measured in months.

BD Emerson is an independent implementation firm. We are not Palantir, we do not resell licenses, we take no resale margin, and we claim no Palantir partner tier or badge. That independence lets us recommend a narrower first contract, a different platform, or no Palantir at all when the workload does not need it.

Common misconceptions about Palantir

Most misconceptions about Palantir come from mixing up the software with the missions customers use it for. The public record on each is clear.

Where BD Emerson fits

BD Emerson implements Palantir Foundry and AIP for enterprises. Our work starts with the decision a client wants operators to make differently, then builds the data connections, pipelines, ontology, applications, and security controls that decision needs, with one workflow in production before a second begins. Because we take no margin on Palantir software, the size of the license has no bearing on what we recommend.

Frequently asked questions

What does Palantir do in simple terms? Palantir builds software that pulls an organization's data together into one model of its real-world objects, such as customers, aircraft, or claims, and lets people and AI agents make and record decisions on that model. Government agencies use its Gotham platform for intelligence and military work, companies use Foundry to run operations, AIP adds large language models, and Apollo keeps the software deployed and updated.

Does Palantir sell data? No. Palantir sells software, and its 2025 Form 10-K states, "We are not in the business of collecting, mining, or selling data." Customers bring their own data into Palantir's platforms and control who can see it. In NHS England's Federated Data Platform, for example, each NHS organization is the data controller for its instance, and the supplier may not use the data for its own purposes.

Who are Palantir's customers? Palantir had 954 customers at the end of 2025, split between government agencies and commercial companies. Public examples include the US Army, the Department of Defense and NATO through the Maven Smart System, police forces in three German states, NHS England, Airbus, bp, Swiss Re, Lear, and Fannie Mae. Government customers produced 51 percent of revenue in the quarter ended June 30, 2026, and commercial customers produced 49 percent.

How does Palantir make money? Palantir sells subscriptions to its software platforms, usually under multi-year contracts, and grows each account as more workflows move onto the platform. In the quarter ended June 30, 2026, it reported $1.935 billion of revenue, with $1.573 billion from US customers. It often starts new commercial customers with short AIP bootcamps that build working use cases on the customer's own data.

Is Palantir an AI company? Palantir is a software company whose products now center on AI. Its Artificial Intelligence Platform, launched in April 2023, connects third-party large language models to an organization's ontology and lets agents act through governed actions with audit trails. Palantir's value sits in the data integration, ontology, security, and deployment layers that make those models usable on real operations.

Do you need Palantir engineers to implement Palantir software? No. Palantir attaches its own forward deployed engineers to many deployments, but customers can also build with internal teams or independent implementation firms. What matters more than who does the work is that one workflow reaches production with security configured, operators using it, and a measured baseline before the program expands.

If you are working out whether a Palantir platform fits your organization, and which one, our Palantir consulting team can map your first use case to the right product and a realistic scope before you discuss pricing with Palantir.