From CIA cash to local police: How Palantir started.

46 minutes ago7 min read1 comments

The genesis of Palantir Technologies stands as a quintessential case study in the intersection of venture capital skepticism and governmental foresight, a narrative that would fundamentally reshape the architecture of modern surveillance. In 2004, the company's inaugural quest for investment reached its nadir during a pitch meeting with Sequoia Capital, arguably Silicon Valley's most influential VC firm.Despite the firm's historical ties to PayPal and the involvement of its renowned partner, Michael Moritz, who was close with Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, the reception was profoundly dismissive. CEO Alex Karp would later recall with palpable ire that Moritz spent the meeting doodling absentmindedly, an affront that crystallized Karp's enduring contempt for the professional investment class.This early rejection, however, proved to be a critical inflection point, steering Palantir toward a far more consequential patron: In-Q-Tel, the Central Intelligence Agency's venture capital arm. Established in 1999 under Director George Tenet with the strategic objective of maintaining the U.S. intelligence community's technological supremacy, In-Q-Tel represented a radical departure from traditional government procurement.The agency, still reeling from the humiliating intelligence failure of 9/11, was actively seeking next-generation data analytics capabilities to replace its incumbent system, i2's Analyst's Notebook, which was deemed architecturally limited. In-Q-Tel's CEO, Gilman Louie, a former flight simulator designer, took a personal interest in Palantir due to Thiel's involvement and was immediately struck by the team's pivot from sales rhetoric to engineering problem-solving during their demonstration.This led to a seminal $1. 25 million investment from In-Q-Tel, matched by Thiel's additional $2.84 million, a deal notably structured without a board seat for the agency—a tactical advantage Palantir would fiercely protect. The true value of this partnership was not merely financial but operational, granting Palantir unprecedented access to embed its engineers, like co-founder Stephen Cohen and Aki Jain, directly within the CIA's terrorism finance desk.This iterative, biweekly process between Palo Alto and Langley, which saw Cohen nicknamed 'Two Weeks,' pioneered the 'forward-deployed engineer' model that became a cornerstone of Palantir's strategy. It was through this intense, collaborative development cycle that Palantir built Gotham, its first software platform, ingeniously incorporating what Karp grandly termed a 'Hegelian' synthesis of public safety and civil liberties via built-in privacy controls and audit trails.The platform's ultimate validation came not from a top-down mandate but from a bottom-up conversion by a CIA counterterrorism analyst, Sarah Adams, who became an internal evangelist after witnessing its superior data-churning speed and intuitive 'smartness' in handling misspelled names and disparate data formats. This CIA contract was the breakthrough, proving the software's viability and realizing Thiel's original ambition to aid the U.S. government's counterterrorism efforts.This success naturally bled into domestic law enforcement, beginning with the New York City Police Department's intelligence unit under CIA veteran David Cohen in 2007, and later expanding to the Los Angeles Police Department where its use in predictive policing initiatives like LASER ignited fierce debates over algorithmic bias and civil liberties, critiques Karp dismissed as anti-quantitative dogmatism. Despite the subsequent termination of most U.S. police contracts by 2021 due to public pressure and controversies—exemplified by research showing the LAPD's use of Palantir for vast digital dragnets—the company's foundational journey from CIA cash to local police underscores a broader, historical trend: the migration of tools developed for national security into the domestic sphere, creating a permanent and opaque infrastructure of surveillance whose accountability remains a profound challenge for democratic societies.

#Palantir

#CIA

#In-Q-Tel

#surveillance

#data analytics

#predictive policing

#civil liberties

#featured

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