(Note: This is not a traditional IPO. This is a direct listing of Palantir’s Class A common stock on the New York Stock Exchange without the involvement of underwriters. From the prospectus: “We have engaged Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC (“Morgan Stanley”), Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC, Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC, Allen & Company LLC, RBC Capital Markets, LLC, Citigroup Global Markets Inc., Jefferies LLC, HSBC Securities (USA) Inc., SG Americas Securities, LLC, CIBC World Markets Corp., Scotia Capital (USA) Inc., and MUFG Securities Americas Inc. as our financial advisors. There will be no book building process and no price at which underwriters initially sold shares to the public to help inform efficient and sufficient price discovery with respect to the opening trades on the NYSE.”)

We build software platforms for large institutions whose work is essential to our way of life. Those institutions must be able to function in times of stability as well as crisis and uncertainty. To do so, they need software that works. We were founded in 2003 and started building software for the intelligence community in the United States to assist in counterterrorism investigations and operations. We later began working with commercial enterprises.

We have built two principal software platforms, Palantir Gotham (“Gotham”) and Palantir Foundry (“Foundry”). Gotham, our first software platform, was constructed for analysts at defense and intelligence agencies. They were hunting for needles not in one, but in thousands of haystacks. And they did not have the software they needed to do their jobs. In Afghanistan and Iraq, soldiers were mapping networks of insurgents and makers of roadside bombs by hand. Gotham enables users to identify patterns hidden deep within datasets, ranging from signals (from) intelligence sources to reports from confidential informants, and helps U.S. and allied military personnel find what they are looking for. We later found that the challenges faced by commercial institutions when it came to working with data were fundamentally similar. Companies routinely struggle to manage, let alone make sense of, the data involved in large projects. Foundry was built for them. Our software is used by customers across 36 industries and in more than 150 countries.