Abstract: This article demonstrates Palantir’s business development in the first quarter of 2021, and describes in detail the application scenarios and case sharing of multiple Palantir products, so that you can have a deeper understanding of this mysterious big data analysis company.
Speaking of last time
In the previous article “A leader in big data analyzing business – Palantir“, we introduced an overview of Palantir and some of our views. If you are interested, you can check it out. In this article, we plan to sort out some of Palantir’s business development in the first quarter of this year in detail, so that you can learn more about the company’s current business development and the company’s future development plans.
Outlook
First of all, Palantir CEO Alex Karp stated that the revenue guidance for 2021 will be maintained at 30%, and the annual revenue guidance for the next five years is also expected to be 30%, and that it will focus on generating revenues of more than US$4B in 2025.
Palantir believes that the road ahead is full of opportunities. In the United States, government revenue increased by 83%, while commercial customers increased by 72%. Even with strong business growth, Palantir believes that there is still a lot of room for growth in these markets, especially because Palantir’s commercial customers only include a few Fortune 500 companies, and Palantir’s revenue from the US government only accounts for less than 0.1% of the annual US defense expenditures. In addition, since February this year, Palantir found that business opportunities in the United States and the United Kingdom have increased by 2.5 times. On the other hand, Palantir has just adjusted its strategy and started to move the market down to mid-sized companies.
In addition, Palantir believes that they have a large number of exciting product vision plans to market, and the relevant market demand is huge. Palantir is now taking an aggressive approach and actively investing. At the same time, the company’s strategy is focusing on profitability and growth.
Difference from other market competitors
Palantir believes that their main competitors are not the large technology companies such as Microsoft and Amazon. Instead, they want to compete against the mentality of Palantir’s customers, because Palantir needs to persuade and let their customers understand the benefits that Palantir’s customized solutions can bring to them in the long run. And these benefits are not what other software solution companies can provide.
Compared with the technological solutions provided by other large tech companies such as Microsoft and Amazon, these companies mainly promote their finished software products, or promote more customers to use their ready-to-use cloud products. Palantir described these off-the-shelf solutions as undifferentiated LEGO bots, and could not really solve customer problems.
In contast, Palantir’s software solutions are different. They are establishing some radical and holistic solutions for the future. Palantir’s goal is not to create a well-known software like Microsoft Office. They think they can go further and can develop more important and influential software, not just concentrated in commercial offices, but in front-line application scenarios, such as production plants, airports, medical offices, and even war zones. Palantir expects that their products can radiate into the daily work and life of many customers.
Palantir’s actual case application scenario
Palantir’s products are designed to allow customers to win, and they believe that this is what a modern operating system needs to provide.
1. The staff of nursing facilities in Japan provide nursing services and preventive care to the elderly.
2. The airline’s flight staff follow up the operations of thousands of flights and need to arrange parking spaces for more than a thousand flights.
3. In the work of extinguishing wildfires in California, the fire experts applied the Foundry system to inspect the ground situation.
4. The US and UK governments are applying the Foundry system to run one of the most successful vaccination programs in the world.
5. Thousands of users in the UK, from doctors to administrative staff, close to 2500 vaccination sites, and close to 44 million vaccination times, including appointment, allocation, tracking and delivery of each vaccination, all of which are done through the Foundry system carry out.
6. In the United States, there are a total of 257 million vaccinations, more than 1,600 data sets, 50 states, 14 jurisdictions, as well as pharmacies, manufacturers, and the Foundry system for the US federal government to understand vaccine supply and distribution of the chain including from production to vaccination.
7. Manufacturing is an important business area for Palantir, and Palantir has always accumulated deep capabilities in this business. A typical example is Chrysler, whose factories in North America are using the Foundry system to manage the quality of operations in real time.
8. In addition, Palantir has cutting-edge products that can be used in the management of working capital, procurement, production, demand forecasting, supply chain management, quality, All the entire chain aspects of logistics and manufacturing provide fast value.
9. In the application of life sciences, Palantir’s work in this area has developed very rapidly, and is committed to the work of drug discovery. Palantir and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Health Institute (NHI), Palantir conducted a lot of pre-clinical work, and published public papers.
Palantir’s thoughts on cryptocurrency
Palantir believes that the company possesses relatively sufficient funds in hand. The balance sheet has US$2.3B in cash at the end of the first quarter, and the adjusted free cash flow of US$151M was generated in the first quarter. Palantir stated that it has discussed investing in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin within the company, and has accepted Bitcoin transactions from customers, which he believes will facilitate business development.
Apollo for Edge AI
The management stated that Apollo for Edge AI, which was just shown in April, is now online. Palantir is developing the business of micro models in a pioneering way. Just as micro services have become the basis of the latest software structure, Palantir believes that micro models will be used to implement AI on a large scale to gain lasting advantages.
Apollo for Edge AI is the next evolutionary process of transforming AI into the most important technology. It allows customers to easily train, manage and deploy multiple independently versioned link models into the Edge system. Customers can decompose a job into multiple models with maximum flexibility. Each part can be optimized and upgraded separately, and then further dynamically linked together, regardless of whether each linked part is on multiple different platforms or other places. Or across different sensors and transmitters, so that all components can be combined to achieve greater than the whole. This is the action of operational AI in the Edge system, which can achieve decision-making advantages.
Palantir sees that commercial customers are very interested in this technology, because it can greatly enhance the application of AI models in the same innovative field in the Edge system, such as assisting employees in factories, more effectively detecting wildfires, and conducting operations. The next generation of predictive maintenance, etc.
Based on the actual application results, Palantir saw that the US government’s use in the pandemic was effective, and it was also popular in commercial enterprises. For example, the business departments of some companies actively approached Palantir to try out related services, and the number of related services has doubled, and the business of the US and British governments has also continued to develop in an orderly manner.
Palantir added 11 new commercial customers in the first quarter including MD Anderson and Syntropy. Palantir believes that the more important thing is that for these companies, they can build their own digital architecture in the Foundry system on the first day, where the Palantir products on which 15 years and over US$2B are spent can be used effectively. The platform effectively avoids a large number of risks that may arise in future development and has a better chance of success. Therefore, Palantir is confident to promote the relevant products to more different industries and different customers.
Lilium
Palantir cooperated with Lilium in the first quarter and invested US$43M in Lilium, which would account for 1.3% of the current market capitalization of approximately US$3.3B of Lilium. In addition, Lilium is one of the six SPAC companies currently invested by Palantir.
Lilium is an electric vertical take-off & landing (or eVTOL) transportation company. It will apply the Foundry system to establish an integrated design and integrate engineering, procurement, testing, production, quality, logistics and service operations. Integrated business. In addition, the reason for investing in companies such as Lilium and Sarcos is mainly because they appreciate their management team and corporate culture, and cooperate with them so that Lilium can use Palantir’s software from day one, because they also understand the importance of buying the best operating system from the beginning and it will reduce many obstacles and risks on their development path. In addition, Palantir believes this is a very attractive opportunity to accelerate business development and product distribution, and Palantir is confident to bet on their customers.
Palantir’s value for corporate customers extends from manufacturing and production to sales and after-sales service, transforming IoT and telemetry data into real value. This is not only for OEMs and manufacturers, but also for the suppliers and customers.
Sarcos
Another company that is cooperating is Sarcos. Palantir often mentions that Gotham is like an electronic armor suit in the movie Iron Man. Sarcos is building a physical Iron Man armor suit, and applying the enlarged Foundry to all of Palantir’s familiar industrial and production cases. You can see how Sarcos uses all the features of Apollo for Edge AI to push AI into their exoskeleton. It’s like Jarvis, Tony Stark’s virtual assistant, but in real life.
Palantir actively invests and innovates in competitive companies in developed countries, allowing them to accelerate production and shorten the time to market through Palantir’s software capabilities, helping these companies to expand in a shorter time.
Clients of government agencies
With the support of cutting-edge products, Palantir’s government work scope has been expanded, such as Apollo for Edge AI and investment in distribution. In the first quarter, Palantir signed a five-year contract with the National Nuclear Security Administration worth up to US$90M to provide an operating platform for protecting US nuclear reserves.
In the first quarter, Palantir’s software was used in the global information superiority experiment, enabling all 11 U.S. Department of Defense combat commands to generate global comprehensive strategic decision-making advantages from intelligence, operations, logistics, and supply data, all of which are supported by AI promoted.
On the government side, Palantir sees more and more traditional defense contractors buying their architectures for in-house production and manufacturing of large-scale projects, as well as using the Apollo for Edge AI architecture for its AI-supported platforms to extend these The service life of the platform, and through joint products to create software monetization for itself.
Expansion of the sales team
As Palantir said in February, their plan to increase distribution includes the establishment of a direct sales team, and Palantir has made tremendous progress so far this year. In the first quarter alone, Palantir recruited nearly 50 employees for their sales team, and continued to develop the team to make the relevant channel performance continue to be strong. This allows Palantir to well achieve its goal of increasing the number of three-digit sales this year and exert greater force behind the momentum of the business.
As Palantir’s sales team integrates with outreach and events, more high-quality opportunities are being created. More importantly, customers come to Palantir and have a deeper understanding of their products and the value they release.
In addition to Palantir’s direct sales team, channel expansion is also a key factor in the distribution strategy. Palantir continues to seek and invest in pipeline partners, from free software companies to system integrators and cloud providers, across the government and commercial fields.
Palantir announced its partnership with IBM last quarter, and got its first customer orders within 16 days of launching the product on the market. Palantir believes that in the future, there will be more opportunities to cooperate with Internet Service Providers (ISP) partners.
Palantir continues to expand its contacts with system integrators, and develops targeted connections to markets and regions, industries, and functional areas. There are currently 15 different system integrators working with customers to work on Palantir’s products.
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