Palantir ($PLTR) has a whole bunch of new friends.
At the company’s annual AIPCon on Thursday, the software and data behemoth announced a slew of partnerships, including with defense darlings Epirus, Red Cat, Saildrone, and Saronic. Amidst surging interest in new defense tech, Palantir’s Warp Speed software will help these companies to scale up and streamline production and, as in Saildrone’s case, better control assets on the battlefield.
“We are extremely proud to enable the companies who share our sense of responsibility for the power of American production,” Emily Nguyen, Palantir’s Head of Industrials, said in a statement. Seems like manufacturing really is back, baby.
Take to the skies: At the event, Palantir also announced a partnership with Archer Aviation to build AI-powered aircraft. According to the two companies, Palantir’s software will supercharge Archer’s electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL)—called Midnight—and improve route planning and movement control.
Here’s what else Palantir unveiled:
- A bunch of new commercial customers, including Heineken, Walgreens, RaceTrac, and Ripcord.
- A partnership with revenue manager R1 RCM to launch an “advanced AI lab” called R37 to improve healthcare financial performance.
- New features for its AI platform, including expanded LLM support and a time series data manager.
Up, up, and away: It’s been a hell of a few months for Palantir. In case you missed it, shares in the company soared to over $125/share in February, then lost about a third of their value in the past month. However, the company’s stock price is still up nearly 260% from a year ago, and it was the best performer on the S&P 500 last year.
Plus, the company has a market cap of nearly $200B, way higher than all of the defense primes. Some analysts, however, believe that Palantir’s valuation is far too high. The company is currently valued at over 200X revenue. For context, Lockheed Martin is valued at just over 6X revenue.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp had some choice words for naysayers at a launch event for his book last month.
“I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts that tried to screw us,” he said.