Palantir CFO Dave Glazer: US commercial revenue up 90%+ with fewer than 400 customers — 'the runway ahead is massive'
Sep 4, 2025 with Dave Glazer
Key Points
- Palantir's US commercial revenue surged over 90% last quarter with fewer than 400 customers, leaving CFO Dave Glazer confident the expansion runway remains massive.
- Headcount grew 12% over two years while revenue climbed 88%, a gap Glazer attributes to permanent operational shifts forced by COVID-era deployment constraints.
- Glazer argues Palantir's model-agnostic architecture insulates it from AI inference cost pressures that could compress margins at vendors dependent on single foundation model APIs.
Summary
Palantir's US commercial business grew more than 90% last quarter while operating with fewer than 400 customers, according to CFO Dave Glazer. That combination of hypergrowth and a still-minimal customer base is central to how Glazer frames the company's opportunity — the revenue base is small enough that the expansion runway remains enormous.
Glazer pushes back on the idea that AI inference costs will structurally compress enterprise software margins over time. His view is that token costs are falling as model benchmark scores improve, and that gross margin pressure will be manageable for companies focused on value delivery rather than raw compute reselling. He points to Palantir's model-agnostic architecture — demonstrated at AIPCon through its Hive Mind product — as a structural advantage over vendors whose economics are tied to a single foundation model API.
Competitive positioning is framed not as head-to-head displacement of named software vendors, but as replacement of two categories: the patchwork of legacy point products most large enterprises run, and custom-built internal software. Glazer argues that once a customer builds a compounding data asset on the Palantir platform, demand for surrounding point products erodes organically.
On operating leverage, the numbers are stark. Headcount is up roughly 12% over two years while revenue has grown 88% over the same period — a ratio Glazer attributes directly to continuous product improvement. He traces this pattern back to the COVID period, when travel and on-site deployment restrictions forced the company to extend product capability rather than add people, a shift he says permanently changed the cost structure.
Glazer has been at Palantir for 12 years, taking over the CFO role in 2017 when predecessor Colin Anderson retired. His characterization of the company's finance philosophy is that strong financial statements were an output of building the right product, not an objective the company optimized toward directly — a framing consistent with how Alex Karp has long positioned the business to skeptical investors.