What Is Palantir? The CIA-Backed Data Firm Behind ICE's Case Systems
Palantir Technologies is a data-analysis software company whose earliest customers were U.S. defense and intelligence agencies. Here is what the public record shows.
Founding and a name from Tolkien
Palantir was founded and incorporated in Delaware in 2003, according to the company's 2020 registration statement filed with the SEC. That filing identifies Alexander Karp, Stephen Cohen and Peter Thiel as its founders, and Karp serves as chief executive. The company takes its name from the seeing stones in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, CNN reported when the company went public.
The intelligence world was involved early. CNN noted that Palantir had financial backing from the CIA. That money came through In-Q-Tel, the agency's venture capital arm, which put in $1.25 million in exchange for equity while Thiel contributed $2.84 million, according to a Fast Company history of the company.
What it sells
Palantir's first product, Gotham, was built for defense and intelligence analysts, its SEC filing says. The company now markets Gotham as an operating system for defense decision-making. Foundry, aimed at businesses and civilian agencies, pulls an organization's data into one central system, the company says on its Foundry product page. Apollo is a tool for automating software deployment, and AIP, its Artificial Intelligence Platform, lets customers run large language models on their own private networks.
Palantir began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Sept. 30, 2020, under the ticker PLTR. It used a direct listing rather than a traditional IPO, and shares opened at $10 against a $7.25 reference price, CNBC reported.
Work with ICE
Palantir's work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement goes back more than a decade. In September 2014, ICE awarded the company a $41.6 million contract to build a cloud-based investigative case management system, Nextgov reported. That system, known as ICM, modernized an older ICE records system called TECS, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which sued ICE for records about the relationship. EPIC also describes FALCON, a separate Palantir tool, as ICE's main system for storing and analyzing data.
In 2019, ICE renewed the ICM work in a deal worth about $49 million over three years, Mother Jones reported. In 2025, ICE agreed to pay Palantir $30 million for a platform called ImmigrationOS, with a prototype due by Sept. 25, 2025, and the contract running through September 2027, according to the American Immigration Council. The council says the system is designed to help ICE prioritize who to deport, track people who leave the country on their own and manage cases from identification to removal.
How we reported this: This explainer was drafted with AI assistance from the sources linked above, and every fact was checked against those sources. See an error? Contact us and we'll correct it.
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