Palantir makes surprise move into weather | Official Website of Louis Velazquez, entrepreneur, finance guy and tech innovator

Palantir’s (PLTR) powerful rise never ceases to amaze.

From a hush-hush CIA data miner to a bona fide AI juggernaut, Palantir continues reinventing itself, finding new frontiers to conquer.

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However, its latest pivot might seem the strangest, and its sharpest.

True to form, it isn’t just chasing another headline.

It’s putting powerful new data in the hands of those who can effectively shape what happens next.

It’s been a big year for Palantir stock, fueled by unexpected pivots.

Image source&colon; Joe Raedle/Getty Images

From secretive data miner to AI-powered civic-tech giant

Palantir’s origin story goes back to 2003, when Peter Thiel, fresh off PayPal’s sale to eBay, looked to adapt PayPal’s fraud-fighting “Igor” engine for national security.

Following 9/11, Thiel pitched “intelligence augmentation,” hoping to supercharge human defense analysts.

With a bump from Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture arm, Palantir built its first platform, Gotham, to help the CIA, FBI, and other authorities piece together intelligence, human tips, and open-source chatter to spot threats.

A few years later, in 2010, Palantir’s low-profile clout went public when President Biden’s team tapped it to track billions in wasted stimulus cash.

That same year, it launched Metropolis, later called Foundry, to tackle Wall Street data. That sparked Palantir’s two-lane strategy, which finally helped it diversify its one-dimensional revenue base.

It then tapped into commercial deals for fresh growth, complementing its rock-solid government contracts.

By 2013, Palantir raised roughly $200 million and launched Apollo in 2016 to keep clients’ systems fresh while pushing Foundry into health care and finance.

In 2020, it went public at a whopping $16 billion valuation and moved to Denver, while powering Covid dashboards for the White House and NHS.

The real turning point, though, came with the massive AI boom.

In 2023, Palantir rolled out its Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), layering large language models with its structured data sets.

That same year, it posted its first GAAP profit, bringing in $2.25 billion in sales, up 16.8% from the prior year.

The momentum didn’t slow when in the following year, sales jumped another 28.8% to $2.86 billion, led by a 55% bump in U.S. commercial sales. Also, its S&P 500 debut helped push the stock up 43% that year alone.

Fast-forward to the first quarter of this year, and the numbers still look rock solid.

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Its Q1 sales this year hit $884 million, a 39% year-over-year jump, with commercial sales up 71%.

More importantly, adjusted operating income hit $391 million, good for a 44% margin. Free cash flow stayed strong, too, generating an incredible $370 million adjusted FCF (42% margin) and closing the quarter with $5.4 billion in cash.

So far this year, the stock has soared over 80%, making it the top performer in both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100, with a market cap of over $308 billion.

Palantir’s new weather play shows AI is about more than chatbots

Palantir has Wall Street buzzing with its latest move, and this time, the Big Data giant is turning its focus to the skies.

Partnering with Tomorrow.io, Palantir is looking to make a mark in AI-powered weather forecasting.

On paper, it sounds niche, but there’s a ton of money to be made in knowing when the next storm will hit. Tomorrow.io has carved out its niche in space-based sensors, along with cutting-edge AI models, turning satellite data into real-time weather predictions.

Now, Tomorrow.io is plugging straight into Palantir’s FedStart program.

That gives the emerging Boston startup a fast pass into government deals, the pipeline that helped companies like Anthropic and Grafana Labs scale quickly inside federal agencies.

For Palantir, this partnership runs deeper than just a simple weather toolkit expansion. It shows how it’s looking to be at the heart of federal agencies tackling extreme weather, climate disasters, and even defense logistics that rely on precise forecasts.

Last year alone, the U.S. racked up nearly $183 billion in weather-related damage. And with the climate crisis growing, reliable predictions are becoming a national security currency.

If the rollout works, Palantir’s battle-tested software could become the backbone for the next generation of climate resilience.