The Palantir Mafia behind the hottest startups of Silicon Valley

Copyright © HT Digital Streams Limit all rights reserved. Angel Au-Yeung, The Wall Street Journal 6 min Read 17 Aug 2025, 05:27 pm Ist clockwise from Bo, Peter Thiel, Melody Hildebrandt, Brian Schimpf, Slee Stephens, Garry Tan and Shreya Murthy Illustration: Emil Lendof/WSJ, Getty Images, Bloomberg Summary The NetWork Connect Founders Founders and Venture Capitalists River Camping Trip Some of the most buzzing startups in Silicon Valley share something in common: their founders once worked at Palantir. The founders lean on other ex-Palantir drivers and engineers for support and financing, and tap on the network for rent and funding. Venture Capital firms have come up whose mission is to invest in companies founded by people with Palantir experience. Palantir, the data analysis firm founded by Peter Thiel, is especially known as the Rare Silicon Valley Company that works with the US military and intelligence agencies, including the Trump administration’s immigration suppression. It also has many commercial customers. The stock has sounded over the past twelve months. In the conversation, alumni will refer to themselves as the Palantir Mafia. The invitation to a panel last October, hosted by the Venture Fund South Park Commons in partnership with Palantir, advertised that ‘several members of the’ Palantir Mafia ‘would speak. There are WhatsApp groups and sea nets for alumni to keep in touch – one is called ‘Palantir Pals’. Alumni has either started more than 350 technical enterprises or has been valued at more than $ 1 billion, says Luba Lesiva, who headed investor relations at Palantir from 2014 to 2016. Lesiva runs a business named Palumni VC, a game on the Words Palantir-Alumni. “These engineers are either dropped in the middle of the desert or in an office park in the midwest with a server rack and a screwdriver,” says Lesiva. “Wherever they are sent, no one really wants to be there, but it is the high capacity for work and pain. They can chew glass. ‘ Ross Fubini, founder of the venture firm XYZ Capital, made an investor deck deck in 2017 where he predicted that Palantir would become the next “founder Mafia”. “VC interest in Palantir Mafia has increased over the past few years, but it has been frenetic in recent years,” said Fubini, who invested in more than a dozen startups founded by Palantir alumni. “They just start exceptional businesses in hard industries.” Palantir is known for producing good operators. A major attraction of the Palantir alumni is their general strategy, developed at Palantir, called ‘Forward-DePloyed Engineering’, which is basically a glorified term for consultation. Palantir software -engineers regularly travel to their customers and include themselves. Engineers can find themselves in conflict areas or places as diverse as Omaha or Oman. Once there, they use technological skills to solve their customers’ thorny and most ominous problems. Barry McCardel was a forecasting engineer at Palantir from 2014 to 2018. During his last two years at the business, he helped build a real-time monitoring platform for oil and gas giant BP to help the company analyze its oil pits around the world. He traveled to places like Anchorage and Houston, Scotland and Azerbaijan every other week. “The magic of Palantir was that we took proper software engineers, the type that had offers from Google and Facebook, and placed it on aircraft and sent it to customers,” he said. “It’s not for everyone, and it’s okay.” A year after leaving Palantir, McCardel Hex Technologies began building, a startup of data analysis in 2019. To staff, he and his co-founders also sat ex-Palantir-at-the-Mafia. In that year, he went to a Halloween party from Palantir Alumni in San Francisco, where, dressed as a Grizzly bear, he was re-linked to a former co-worker, dressed as a bumblebee. He rented himself as Hex’s founding designer. In a little over five years at Palantir between 2012 and 2017, Nick Noon led the company’s military deployment projects of the military special operations and traveled as a Palantir engineer to Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Germany. When no one left in 2017 to begin what Peregrine would become technologically, a data for data intelligence that now mainly sells to local government and law enforcement agencies, he applied the forward deployed engineering approach. In 2017, no one and his co-founder embedded themselves with the police department of San Pablo, a city of about 40 minutes from San Francisco. The initial scope of the work was to improve the agency’s data analytical instruments. But soon they were moved in to help investigators solve a manslaughter case. They merged information from cellphone towers, historical police records and badge plate data to help detectives create a timeline from where the murder suspects were during the time of the crime. During the resulting murder trial, no one was called as a knowledgeable witness, and the suspects were convicted. This experience of helping investigators has become the basis of Peregrine. Earlier this year, the company started landing federal contracts. Peregrine closed a financing round in March under the leadership of Sequoia Capital, which appreciates the company at $ 2.5 billion. Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz has worked on agricultural, military and national security projects for Palantir for more than six years and, together with the Marines in the Middle East and East Asia, began to start a Medicare and retirement technology business. Blumenfeld-Gantz has a chapter with Vivek Ramaswamy, Biotech entrepreneur and candidate in the governor of Ohio. Thiel is an investor and serves on his board for less than two years. The company is valued at about $ 1.5 billion today. “I’m proud of the work I did for the government while I was at Palantir,” says Blumenfeld Gantz. “I think most people joining Palantir can handle the nuances of the business.” Anduril Industries, one of the few private technical businesses, is one of the highest profile businesses used by the Palantir Alumni Network to land contracts with the Department of Defense. It contains three former Palantir employees in the founding team: SLAE Stephens, Matt Grimm and Brian Schimpf. The company, which makes software and hardware products and systems for national security operations, was last valued at $ 30.5 billion in June. Stephens said in a TV interview with Bloomberg Technology that the round was over eight to ten times. Last summer, Stephens, in his role as investor in Thiel’s Venture Firm Founders Fund, a luxury camping journey in Sonoma, California, offered to Palantir alumni. Stephens kicked off the two -day journey with a short opening remarks that have touched his days in Palantir, according to people who are familiar with the matter. Among the couple dozen participants who float the Russian river and have painted the weekend, founders, investors and operators in technology, including Ryan Beermeister, Vice President of Public Policy at Openai. Other names that come up regularly as alumni talk about the network are 8VC venthapital and co-founder of Palantir, Joe Lonsdale; Garry Tan, venture cap and CEO of Y Combinator; and Melody Hildebrandt, chief technology officer at Fox Corp.nbsp; Association with Palantir is delicate in some spheres. Shreya Murthy, founder of the event platform, which is popular with Gen Z users, was recently criticized on social media for working at Palantir because of the government contracts after an article about her appeared in the cut. “I joined Palantir when I was 23 and met a lot of smart people who helped me learn what to do (and not to do) when I run a company,” Murthy said in ‘NE post statement. “I left and preferred to build something else, in line with my values and passions.” “We do admit that it can come with luggage,” says Pratap Ranade, an engineer who joined Palantir when he purchased his first start in 2016. He says he is proud of his work there and does not hide his experience. Ranade stayed with Palantir for almost two years as a forward engineer and after he founded his second startup, Arena. The company makes AI-powered software to help hardware engineers testing and fixing machines, similar to Jarvis-the fictional AI software that Tony Stark from Marvel Comics makes to stimulate the Iron Man-pack, including hardware products. Write to Angel Au-Young at Angel.au-Yeung@wsj.com, capture all the corporate news and updates on live currency. Download the Mint News app to get daily market updates and live business news. More Topics #StartUp Read Next Story