Palantir Technologies

Palo Alto, Calif.

Named for the mysterious "seeing stones" in The Lord of the Rings fantasy novels, Palantir Technologies is all about making massive troves of data understandable and finding useful patterns in them. Canadian investigators used the software to uncover the hacking of computers in 103 countries including that of the Dalai Lama. The U.S. Army used it to analyze al Qaeda recruiting records captured in Iraq. The concept grew out of an antifraud analysis project at PayPal, now a unit of eBay (EBAY). PayPal alumni took the concept and improved upon it, building complex visualization features combined with powerful number-crunching capabilities. Customers include government agencies and large financial institutions.

YouNoodle on Palantir Technologies

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