Palantir became a famous meme stock known for its COVID-related software and cool LOTR name. Now, AI and Ukraine are behind the PLTR story.
When meme stocks became popular during the COVID lockdowns and GameStop was all the age, there were other equities that caught the attention of the r/wallstreetbets subreddit group. One of those was an analytical firm called Palintir (pltr). Unlike GameStop, which was essentially a dinosaur in the form of a brick & mortar retail chain for computer games and hardware, Palintir was ahead of its time. Its co-founders include PayPal co-founder Peter Theil as Chairman of the Board.
In the 2010s, the world didn’t quite know what to do with a company developing things called “deep learning” and “intelligence augmentation” to solve nasty problems such as the logistics of COVID vaccine deployment. As such, the CIA’s In-Q-Tel venture fund became Palantir’s first investor after Peter Theil himself. Until COVID came along and launched Palantir into the headlines, PLTR was a nerdish tech stock of a company just gone public and living on government projects. By the end of 2021, the company with the cool name from ‘The Lord of the Rings’ was a meme stock. Volatility ensured.
PLTR post-COVID
In 2022, Palantir’s combination of cutting edge data analysis and problem solving at the government level came together with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine’s government and the western governments supporting it had a variety of huge-scale problems ranging from keeping track of internally displaced people (IDPs), defense logistics, and land mine removal to helping shorten the OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) cycle in the Ukrainian army.
The Ukrainian government is well-disposed toward the digitization of efforts at the humanitarian level. The country’s modern experience with handling the consequences of conflict began in the aftermath of the first shots in the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Internally Displaced People from Crimea and Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts on the Russian border moved into the rest of the country and generated the need for the government at the time to process such people and ensure services such as education and the payment of pensions. This expertise became vital in 2022 as waves of people fleeing the war filtered through the country westward or found places to stay.
Example: De-mining
On March 4, 2024, Palantir and the Ukrainian government signed a contract to digitize the government’s demining program. The size of the project currently includes 156,000 sq km of Ukrainian land. Over six million people are directly at risk from mines and unexploded ordinance. Palantir’s role will be to ensure effective information management and process automation. In order to provide clear and coherent information, and connected data silos.
Is Palantir a meme stock?
In some ways yes, Palantir is a meme stock. It has a dedicated following and hefty retail investor base. And if Gandalf won’t let you look into a Palantir, at least you can own a bit of pltr. But that does not mean that the company itself is not serious.
