Peter Thiel's Palantir is growing its Aussie footprint amid an AI bonanza
Enigmatic big data provider Palantir's business is booming. And it's extending its playbook of branching out from government contracts to the private sector in Australia.
It's an unusual company indeed that can count Coles, Morgan Stanley and the Ukrainian army all as clients. But Palantir does. With its stock price up 160% over the past year, Palantir is often described as a “big data analytics” software provider. Yet that dry descriptor doesn’t begin to sum up what the enigmatic outfit really does.
The core function of Palantir’s business is to analyse disparate sources of data and offer recommendations based on the resulting insights. Founded in the wake of 9/11 by famed venture capitalist Peter Thiel and Alex Karp to provide government departments with threat intel, Palantir has in recent years been expanding expeditiously in the private sector.
That has been the company’s path in Australia. It set up shop here in 2011 to more closely serve the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, which links American spooks to their Antipodean counterparts. In addition to a subsequent contract with the Australian Signals Directorate, Palantir also serves Rio Tinto, Westrac and, as of earlier this month, Coles.
The supermarket chain says it will use Palantir's Foundry platform to better coordinate its workforce of 120,000. Coles doesn't divulge the specifics. But it may combine, say, historical seasonal sales data across all Coles stores with product price fluctuations, adding sprinkles of economic data on top, to anticipate how many staff are required for a Saturday afternoon shift.
