Palantir

In 2003, Peter Thiel, Alex Carp, and three co-founders started Palantir with CIA backing. The initial investment was $2 million. The product was a data integration platform called Gotham. Intelligence agencies had massive databases that could not talk to each other. Phone records in one system, financial transactions in another, travel history in a third. Palantir connected them and unified data. Palantir's deployment model was unusual. Instead of selling licenses, Palantir embedded engineers at client sites for months or years. These engineers built custom integrations, trained analysts, and wove Palantir into daily operations. Salaries cost 150 to 200,000 per engineer per year, but created organizational lock-in competitors could not replicate. Removing Palantir meant retraining thousands of analysts and rebuilding workflows. Government contracts provided initial revenue. Average contract exceeded 10 million annually.