Palantir Technologies has built one of the most distinctive business models in enterprise software. Understanding how Palantir makes money requires looking beyond the surface at its platform-based revenue streams, the split between government and commercial customers, and the segments that are expanding fastest. For investors researching PLTR, mapping these revenue drivers is one of the most useful steps in evaluating whether the stock deserves a spot on a watchlist.
Key takeaways
- Palantir's revenue streams come primarily from two platforms: Gotham (government) and Foundry (commercial), with a newer AI Platform (AIP) accelerating growth across both segments.
- Government contracts have historically provided the bulk of Palantir's revenue, but commercial revenue has been growing at a faster rate as enterprise adoption picks up.
- The Palantir business model is built on long-term, high-value contracts with deep integration into customer operations, which creates significant switching costs.
- Understanding how PLTR makes money means tracking not just total revenue but the mix shift between government and commercial, deal sizes, and net dollar retention rates.
The Palantir business model explained
Palantir is an enterprise software company that builds data integration and analytics platforms. Unlike traditional SaaS companies that sell modular tools, Palantir sells operating systems for data. Its platforms sit on top of a customer's existing data infrastructure, connect siloed datasets, and let users build applications, run models, and make decisions from a single environment.
This is a "land and expand" business model. Palantir typically enters an organization with a focused use case, proves value, and then expands across departments and workflows. The deeper Palantir gets embedded, the harder it is to rip out. That stickiness is central to how Palantir makes money over time.
Land and expand: A sales strategy where a company wins an initial contract (often small or scoped to one department) and then grows revenue within that account by expanding to additional use cases, teams, or business units. It matters for investors because it means revenue growth can come from existing customers, not just new ones.
One thing worth noting: Palantir doesn't sell data. It sells the infrastructure that makes a customer's own data usable. That distinction matters because it means Palantir isn't competing with data providers. It's competing with the messy spreadsheets, disconnected dashboards, and legacy systems that most large organizations still rely on.
What are Palantir's main revenue streams?
Palantir's revenue breaks down into three platform layers, though the company reports financials across two customer segments (government and commercial). Here's what each platform does and who pays for it.
Gotham
Gotham is Palantir's government-focused platform. It was the company's original product, built for intelligence agencies and defense organizations. Gotham helps analysts integrate data from multiple classified and unclassified sources, identify patterns, and coordinate operations. Think of it as the analytical backbone for national security workflows.
Government contracts through Gotham tend to be large, long-duration, and funded by defense and intelligence budgets. These contracts often start with pilot programs and scale into multi-year production deployments. The U.S. government has historically been Palantir's single largest customer, and agencies like the U.S. Army, the CIA, and various branches of the Department of Defense have been well-documented users.
Foundry
Foundry is the commercial counterpart. It does something similar to Gotham but for private sector organizations: it connects fragmented data systems, models supply chains, manages operations, and supports decision-making at scale. Industries like healthcare, energy, manufacturing, and financial services use Foundry to run complex operational workflows.
The commercial segment is where Palantir has been investing heavily in growth. Historically, the knock on Palantir was that its technology was too complex and too expensive for anyone other than governments. Foundry has been the company's answer to that criticism, and the trajectory of commercial revenue is one of the most closely watched metrics for PLTR investors.
AIP (Artificial Intelligence Platform)
AIP is Palantir's newer layer, built to let customers deploy large language models and AI directly on their own data within Gotham or Foundry. Rather than replacing the existing platforms, AIP sits on top of them and adds generative AI capabilities. Palantir has positioned AIP as a way to move AI from experimental chatbots into real operational workflows.
AIP is notable because it has become a significant demand driver. Palantir has run "boot camps" where prospective customers build working AI prototypes on their own data in a matter of days. These boot camps have shortened sales cycles and converted into new contracts at a notable clip. For investors tracking how PLTR makes money going forward, AIP adoption rates are worth monitoring closely.
Net dollar retention rate: A metric that measures how much revenue a company earns from its existing customers compared to the prior period, accounting for expansions, contractions, and churn. A rate above 100% means existing customers are spending more over time. For Palantir, a high net dollar retention rate signals that its land-and-expand model is working.
Government vs. commercial: where does the revenue come from?
Palantir reports revenue in two segments: government and commercial. Understanding the mix between them is one of the most important parts of analyzing the Palantir revenue streams.
Government segment
Government revenue has been the foundation of Palantir's business since the company was founded. These contracts are often large, sometimes worth hundreds of millions of dollars over multiple years. Government revenue tends to be lumpy because contract awards, renewals, and expansions don't follow a smooth quarterly cadence. Budget cycles, procurement timelines, and political priorities all influence the flow.
The upside of government contracts is predictability once they're in place. Multi-year awards provide revenue visibility, and the switching costs for a defense agency to move off Palantir's infrastructure are enormous. The downside is that winning new government contracts can be slow, and concentration risk exists when a handful of agencies account for a large share of revenue.
Commercial segment
Commercial revenue has been the faster-growing segment, and it's where most of the growth narrative for Palantir lives. The company has been expanding its sales force, running AIP boot camps, and building more self-service functionality to lower the barrier for mid-market and enterprise customers.
U.S. commercial revenue growth has been particularly strong. International commercial has been slower, partly because enterprise sales cycles outside the U.S. are longer and partly because Palantir has concentrated resources on the domestic market. Investors evaluating the Palantir business model should pay attention to U.S. commercial customer count and average deal size, because those two metrics together tell you whether Palantir is broadening its customer base or just upselling existing accounts.
How does Palantir's pricing work?
Palantir's pricing model is worth understanding because it's different from a typical SaaS subscription. The company generally charges based on a combination of platform access fees, usage-based components, and professional services for implementation and customization.
In the early days, Palantir relied heavily on "forward-deployed engineers" who worked on-site with customers to integrate and customize the platform. This made implementations expensive and labor-intensive. Over time, Palantir has moved toward a more scalable model where the software does more of the work and fewer engineers are needed per deployment. That shift matters for margins. As Palantir reduces its dependence on professional services revenue and grows platform subscription revenue, gross margins should improve.
For government contracts, pricing is often determined through competitive bidding processes or sole-source awards. For commercial customers, pricing tends to be negotiated based on scope, data volume, and the number of use cases deployed. The AIP boot camp model has introduced a new dynamic where customers start with a short, intensive engagement and then convert to longer-term contracts if the results justify it.
What's driving Palantir's growth?
Several factors are fueling the acceleration in Palantir's revenue, and they're worth separating because some are cyclical and some are structural.
- AI demand: The explosion of interest in AI has been a tailwind. Palantir's AIP gives organizations a way to deploy AI on their proprietary data in a governed, secure environment. This is a hard problem to solve, and most enterprises don't want to send sensitive data to third-party AI providers. Palantir's approach of bringing AI to the data, rather than sending data to the AI, resonates with security-conscious organizations.
- U.S. commercial expansion: Palantir has meaningfully grown its U.S. commercial customer base. The boot camp model has compressed sales cycles from months to weeks in some cases, and deal sizes have been increasing as customers move from pilots to enterprise-wide deployments.
- Government modernization: Defense and intelligence agencies are under pressure to modernize their data infrastructure. Programs like the U.S. Army's TITAN system and various Department of Defense AI initiatives have provided Palantir with large, long-term contracts.
- Margin expansion: As Palantir shifts toward more software-driven revenue and reduces reliance on forward-deployed engineers, operating margins have been improving. The company reached GAAP profitability, which was a milestone that opened the door to index inclusion and broader institutional ownership.
Here's the thing about Palantir's growth: it's not just about adding customers. It's about expanding within accounts. A customer that starts with one use case in one department and eventually runs dozens of workflows across the organization represents compounding revenue without the acquisition cost of finding a new buyer. That's the core engine.
How to evaluate Palantir's revenue streams as an investor
If you're researching PLTR, there are several metrics and dynamics worth tracking beyond just top-line revenue growth. You can find many of these on Palantir's stock research page on Rallies.ai or by digging into the company's quarterly filings.
- Revenue mix: Track the ratio of government to commercial revenue over time. A shift toward commercial revenue generally signals broader market adoption and reduced customer concentration risk.
- Customer count growth: How fast is Palantir adding new customers, especially in the U.S. commercial segment? More customers mean a wider base for future expansion.
- Net dollar retention: This tells you whether existing customers are spending more or less over time. For a land-and-expand model, this metric is arguably more important than new customer acquisition.
- Remaining deal value (RDV): This is the total value of contracts that haven't been recognized as revenue yet. Growing RDV provides visibility into future revenue.
- Gross and operating margins: Improving margins signal that Palantir is scaling its software revenue faster than its services costs. This is the transition from a consulting-heavy model to a true platform business.
You can use the Rallies.ai Vibe Screener to compare Palantir's financial metrics against other enterprise software companies and see how it stacks up on valuation, growth, and profitability measures.
How does Palantir compare to other enterprise software companies?
Palantir occupies an unusual space. It's not a pure SaaS company with simple per-seat pricing. It's not a consulting firm, though it has consulting-like elements. And it's not a traditional defense contractor, even though a large chunk of revenue comes from government.
The closest comparisons might be companies like Snowflake (data infrastructure), C3.ai (enterprise AI), or even traditional defense technology companies like L3Harris. But none of these are perfect analogs. Palantir's combination of deep government relationships, proprietary data integration technology, and an AI platform layer makes it somewhat unique.
That uniqueness is both a strength and a challenge for investors. It's a strength because Palantir doesn't have a direct competitor doing exactly what it does at the same scale. It's a challenge because there's no clean peer group to benchmark against, which makes valuation tricky. Investors often debate whether to value Palantir like a high-growth SaaS company, an AI platform, or a defense technology firm. The answer probably involves elements of all three.
Risks to the Palantir business model
No business model breakdown is complete without looking at what could go wrong. Here are the risks investors should weigh:
- Valuation risk: Palantir has historically traded at a premium valuation relative to its revenue and earnings. If growth disappoints, the multiple could compress significantly.
- Government concentration: While commercial revenue is growing, government contracts still represent a large share. Budget cuts, political shifts, or contract losses could create volatility.
- Competition: Hyperscalers like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all offer data analytics and AI tools. If large enterprises decide that cloud-native tools are "good enough," Palantir's value proposition could erode.
- Stock-based compensation: Palantir has historically issued significant stock-based compensation, which dilutes existing shareholders. Tracking SBC as a percentage of revenue is useful for understanding the true cost of growth.
- International expansion: Growing outside the U.S. has been slower than expected. If Palantir can't crack international commercial markets, the total addressable market is smaller than bulls project.
None of these risks are fatal on their own, but they're worth monitoring. The best approach is to check the data periodically and see whether the trends are improving or deteriorating. You can track market news on Rallies.ai to stay updated on developments that might affect these risk factors.
Try it yourself
Want to run this kind of analysis on your own? Copy any of these prompts and paste them into the Rallies AI Research Assistant:
- Break down how Palantir makes money — what are their main revenue streams, who are their biggest customers, and which parts of the business are growing fastest?
- Break down how Palantir makes money — what are their biggest revenue streams and what's growing fastest?
- Compare Palantir's business model to Snowflake and C3.ai — how do their revenue models, customer bases, and growth rates differ?
Frequently asked questions
What are Palantir's main revenue streams?
Palantir generates revenue through its three platform layers: Gotham (serving government and defense clients), Foundry (serving commercial enterprises), and AIP (its AI platform that layers on top of both). Revenue comes from a mix of software subscriptions, usage-based fees, and professional services for implementation. The company reports financials across two segments: government and commercial.
How does the Palantir business model work?
Palantir uses a land-and-expand approach. It wins an initial contract with a customer, often focused on a single department or use case, then grows the relationship by proving value and expanding to additional workflows and teams. The platforms integrate deeply into customer operations, creating high switching costs. Over time, revenue per customer tends to grow as deployments widen.
Is Palantir's government or commercial segment growing faster?
The commercial segment, particularly U.S. commercial, has been growing at a faster rate than government. However, government revenue still represents a significant portion of total revenue and benefits from large, multi-year contract awards. Investors tracking PLTR often watch the commercial growth rate as a signal of whether Palantir can expand beyond its government roots.
How does PLTR make money from AI?
Palantir's AI Platform (AIP) lets customers deploy large language models and other AI tools directly on their own data within the Gotham or Foundry environment. AIP generates revenue through platform access and has also become a sales tool: Palantir runs intensive "boot camps" where prospects build working AI prototypes, which often convert into longer-term contracts. AIP has been a meaningful demand driver for both new customer acquisition and existing account expansion.
What is Palantir's competitive advantage?
Palantir's main competitive advantage is its deep data integration capability. While many companies offer analytics or AI tools, Palantir specializes in connecting messy, siloed data systems into a unified operating environment. Its years of experience with classified government data give it credibility with security-conscious customers. The depth of integration also creates high switching costs, which protects existing revenue.
How does Palantir's pricing compare to typical SaaS companies?
Palantir's pricing is more complex than a standard SaaS subscription. It typically involves platform access fees, usage components, and sometimes professional services for setup and customization. Deal sizes tend to be larger than typical SaaS contracts, reflecting the enterprise-wide nature of Palantir's deployments. The company has been working to simplify its go-to-market approach, particularly for mid-market commercial customers, but it's still a higher-touch sales process than most SaaS products.
What should investors watch when evaluating Palantir's revenue streams?
Key metrics include the government-to-commercial revenue mix, U.S. commercial customer count, net dollar retention rate, remaining deal value, and operating margin trends. Together, these metrics paint a picture of whether Palantir is broadening its customer base, deepening existing relationships, and improving profitability. You can research these metrics using tools like the Rallies AI Research Assistant.
Bottom line
Understanding how Palantir makes money comes down to three things: platform revenue from Gotham and Foundry, the growing contribution of AIP as an AI demand driver, and the land-and-expand dynamic that increases revenue per customer over time. The government segment provides a stable base, while commercial growth is the story investors are betting on.
If you want to dig deeper into Palantir's financials or compare it against peers, start with the stock analysis resources on Rallies.ai and build your own view of whether the business model justifies the valuation.
Disclaimer: This article is for educational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice, financial advice, trading advice, or any other type of advice. Rallies.ai does not recommend that any security, portfolio of securities, transaction, or investment strategy is suitable for any specific person. All investments involve risk, including the possible loss of principal. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Before making any investment decision, consult with a qualified financial advisor and conduct your own research.
Written by Gav Blaxberg, CEO of WOLF Financial and Co-Founder of Rallies.ai.