Palantir signs first $1B deal outside the US — UK Ministry of Defence plus $2B investment commitment

products and brands and we have our first guest of the show from Palunteer coming into the studio. Welcome to the stream.

How are you doing Lewis? Good to see you.

Very good to see you guys. Thank you for having me on.

Thanks so much. Uh would you mind kicking us off with an introduction on yourself, a little bit of your backstory, history of Palunteer, and we'll go into the news.

Yeah, sure. So, I'm Louis. I run Palunteer out here in the UK and Europe. Uh you can tell probably from my accent that I'm British.

And I've been at Palanteer like almost a decade. Um so seen a seen a seen a lot of change. Um a lot of growth out here in the UK and Europe. um that journey from a business that was very focused on defense and intel with a tiny bit of corporate to now a business that's serving every bit of the public sector and every corporate sector you can think of.

And what's the news today or yesterday?

Well, the big news is well technically no technically it was uh early UK time this morning so you're not out of date. Uh uh we announced a big uh big deal with the UK Ministry of Defense. U billion dollars.

A billion.

First billion dollar deal.

A billion US dollars.

Congratulations.

Thank you. Thank you guys. Uh well, it's the first billion dollar deal that Palanteer has done outside the US. So it's a big significant milestone. Uh and alongside that deal, we also announced uh a big investment into the UK, $2 billion over the next five years. Uh the creation of 350 new jobs.

Mhm.

And uh our European HQ for defense will be in London.

What is the $2 billion uh investment look like? Is that uh just the investment in the team opex capex? Like how are you thinking about that?

It's all of those. And uh London is already um little known fact it's already home to about 20% of Palanteer's headcount.

Oh wow.

It's uh so it's actually our second largest office globally. So we do a lot more than just support you you know British customers from this office. We do a lot of product development. Uh and it serves as a as Yeah. as like the European and and broader Emir headquarters.

Yeah. When did you realize that billiondoll deals were possible? Was it 10 years ago when you started? Was it 5 years ago? Was it more recently? It's a big number.

Yeah. I I think I always believed um and and I I think we're only just getting started. You know, this is uh you know, we'll look back in 5 years time, I think, and and we'll think, yeah, those were small deals. Um you know, the power of the software is such and it's meeting its moment. uh you know the significance of this deal is is it's you know we are the operating system for the modern battlefield

and we've seen the US make that move and the significance of the news today is is the US's closest ally the UK

making the same move.

Yeah. What what's the mood like in the UK relative to the rest of Europe? We talked to Dr. Karp uh was that just last week or was it the week before? uh about uh the reception and what's going on in Germany. He of course studied in Germany and he was uh kind of joking about the lack of uh entrepreneurial talent and adoption and uh kind of getting with the program in Germany, but it seems like the UK might be a little bit more forward thinking. Walk me through sort of the view in Europe technology right now.

I think I think that's spot on. I think the UK is an outlier. Um we've got uh especially here in London an incredible talent pool

uh especially in the computer science software engineering domains you know that's why Palenteer has so many people here it's why we do product development here it's it's really access to the talent

and you've got deep mind you've got you know you've got a key key parts of the of the broader AI supply chain ecosystem are are here and I think it means UK is is like the only country in the west broadly defined outside the US that does have that kind of talent pool uh and obviously the language helps speaking English the connection to the US and uh you know we weren't alone right today Palanteer is not the only company to have announced a big investment in the UK alongside um President Trump's visit we saw Microsoft we saw Nvidia we saw open AI we saw Google a whole raft of big tech make big investments

uh how are you thinking about the work that you'll actually do. How how concrete is it? How much can you share about uh what's actually in scope for this contract?

I I can share bits of it. Obviously, a lot of it is sensitive operational details, but um a key part of it will be what the UK is calling the digital targeting web.

Uh we we Palunteer will be a component of that. It'll involve many many other companies and players. And you could think of that a bit like what the Maven smart system does for the US. So it's really your targeting infrastructure, how you connect up all your sensors, your satellites, your drones, all of your various data feeds with your aectors, you know, the stuff that you're going to use to shoot airplanes, tanks, missiles. And uh it's that data infrastructure that sits in between that. It's it's the harness in which you then run all of the sophisticated AI and computer vision algorithms and and so forth. And uh a lot of it is inspired and frankly lessons learned from the war in Ukraine

where this the same technology our our platforms have been as you'll know deployed by the Ukrainians day in day out now for nearly 3 years

and those lessons are being learned and you know we're seeing the future of warfare play out in real time and uh you know the significance of this is is is the UK government making a multi multi-million pound investment in in that

what was the uh what was the precursor technology to Maven. I remember when I uh when I dug into it, I mean it was like controversial program here in the United States. And um and when I looked into it, it seemed like the precursor to using image recognition and computer vision to identify objects and images was uh thousands of Air Force airmen tagging and basically doing something that you would expect like a data labeling firm to do. And it's not like the government wasn't trying to identify images, objects, and images. Uh they just weren't using technology. Is it the same thing over in the UK? Like what what's the lineage of this?

Yeah, exactly right. And and if anything, the the the problem is more severe because the UK is smaller and has fewer resources than the US.

So, uh you know, you're never going to have enough eyeballs to watch all of those feeds. M

so you need to find some way of of automating that and surfacing something of interest to the human when when that occurs when that matters that's how you're going to scale up. Does this type of uh deal make uh the next five deals with other western allies easier? Right. I'm assuming that uh it would be you know given it just becomes much more difficult to coordinate if if allies are operating on different systems but I don't know if I have the wrong framework for that. I think no I think that's that's a that's a I mean obviously I'd hope that's a likely scenario but it's you know it's critical and again this is a lesson from Ukraine right the interoperability is everything

the ability to t pass targets seamlessly between uh between units between allies that is that is the way we're going to uh confront and deter the adversaries that we now have in the west

when we talked to Dr. Karp he mentioned that um because of the current structure of Palunteer because of the the where we are in the technological adoption curve artificial intelligence uh he did not expect headcount to grow significantly does this deal change anything for Palunteer's UK office I imagine it's like a whole lot more business it might justify some hiring are you hiring uh how do you think about actually supporting 350 new hires but that didn't feel like a huge number in the I mean it just you know the efficiency of of the platform

it will it will mean we hire uh we will be creating jobs but

the output per head

y

is going to grow even more significantly you know I think uh you you know Ted Mabry my colleague who runs uh runs the US or the global commercial business was just tweeting today about AI FDEES So the the forward deployed engineers we had that have historically been human beings, we're starting to to to replace some of the work they would have done manually in the past with AI. And you can just see a path now where like 90% of what used to be the day-to-day job can be done by AI. So then suddenly you've got 10 FTEEs for every one you used to have. I mean the the the exponential here is is crazy.

It's amazing. Uh well congratulations. Thanks so much for coming on and staying up late to join the stream. Not a Yeah. billion dollar deal. We have to hit this button for you.

Overnight success.

There we go.

Thanks so much for coming on the show. We'll talk soon. Congrats.

Thank you. Thank you.

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