The New York firm wrote early checks into Palantir, Datadog and Venmo, then stayed in the boardroom for the parts that actually get hard.
Palantir Technologies builds software platforms that integrate large, messy data sets and put them to work for decision-making. Founded in 2003 in the shadow of PayPal's fraud-detection work, the company sells four flagship products - Gotham, Foundry, Apollo, and the Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) - to governments, defense and intelligence agencies, and commercial enterprises in finance, healthcare, energy, and manufacturing. Led by co-founder and CEO Alex Karp, Palantir has grown from a controversial government contractor into a fast-growing public company riding demand for operational AI.