Palantir Technologies Inc. (NYSE:PLTR) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript May 6, 2024 5:00 PM ET
Company Participants
Ana Soro – Finance Team
Ryan Taylor – CRO & Chief Legal Officer
Shyam Sankar – CTO
Dave Glazer – CFO
Alex Karp – CEO
Conference Call Participants
Daniel Ives – Wedbush
Mariana Perez Mora – Bank of America
Ana Soro
Good afternoon. I’m Ana Soro from Palantir’s Finance Team, and I’d like to welcome you to our First Quarter 2024 Earnings Call. We’ll be discussing the results announced in our press release issued after the market close and posted on our Investor Relations website.
During the call, we will make statements regarding our business that may be considered forward-looking within applicable securities laws, including statements regarding our second quarter and fiscal 2024 results, management’s expectations for our future financial and operational performance, and other statements regarding our plans, prospects, and expectations. These statements are not promises or guarantees and are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause them to differ materially from actual results. Information concerning those risks is available in our earnings press release distributed after the market close today and in our SEC filings. We undertake no obligation to update forward-looking statements except as required by law.
Further, during the course of today’s call, we will refer to certain adjusted financial measures. These non-GAAP financial measures should be considered in addition to, not as a substitute for, or in isolation from GAAP measures. Additional information about these non-GAAP measures, including a reconciliation of non-GAAP to comparable GAAP measures, is included in our press release and investor presentation provided today. Our press release, investor presentation, and other earnings materials are available on our Investor Relations website at investors.palantir.com. Over the course of the call, we will refer to various growth rates when discussing our business. These rates reflect year-over-year comparisons unless otherwise stated.
Joining me on today’s call are Alex Karp, Chief Executive Officer; Shyam Sankar, Chief Technology Officer; Dave Glazer, Chief Financial Officer; and Ryan Taylor, Chief Revenue Officer and Chief Legal Officer.
I’ll now turn it over to Ryan to start the call.
Ryan Taylor
We started the year exceedingly strong with revenue of $634 million, an increase of 21% year-over-year, driven by the momentum of AIP and our continued strong performance in US commercial. Our results also highlight the growing strength of our US government business and our enduring mission-critical work. The continued interest in AIP is loud and clear in the conversations I’m having across our customer base. We’ve shared our plans to capture the market with AIP and our results show that our strategy is not only succeeding, it is accelerating.
While still early days, our focus is on building the foundations of a long-term business. We intend to relentlessly continue landing new customers and subsequently expanding those engagements as our products gain traction and have meaningful impact within enterprises. Not only are we increasing the volume of new customers, but I’m pleased with our ability to grow these new customers as well.
With regards to landing new customers, we’ve sustained our high volume of bootcamps with over 915 organizations participating to date to meet inbound demand. We are also seeing substantial deal cycle compression. As one example, a leading utility company signed a seven-figure deal just five days after completing a bootcamp. Another customer immediately signed a paid engagement after just one day of their multi-day bootcamp and then converted to a seven-figure deal three weeks later. We expect the favorable unit economics and higher throughput to continue to accelerate our business.
US commercial is where we’re seeing the greatest transformation. While Q1 is seasonally our slowest quarter, AIP adoption by new and existing customers helped drive notable growth in customer acquisition and revenue in our US commercial business. In Q1, we added 41 net new customers in US commercial. Our customer count increased 69% year-over-year and 19% quarter-over-quarter compared to 8% quarter-over-quarter growth in Q1 2023. Excluding strategic investments, our US commercial revenue soared by 68% year-over-year and 22% quarter-over-quarter. New customers span a variety of industries as AIP’s applications seem endless, from the largest independent bottling company in the US to a leading energy and infrastructure company and a multinational airline.
In Q1, our US commercial business had customers from 56 of the 74 GICS industries. As we’re landing new customers, we’re also seeing those customers expanding their work with us. Across my conversations with customers, I’ve seen the recurring theme of them asking me how they can do more faster with enterprise transformations driven by AIP. We’re showing them how they can move their AI strategy beyond chat. Existing customers such as Lowe’s, Cleveland Clinic, and General Mills, among others, are realizing the extensive possibilities of AIP within their own enterprises and increasing their scope accordingly. Lowe’s accelerated its engagement from a starting point of no AI to utilizing production-level AI for over 1,000 customer service agents, resulting in a 75% reduction in overdue tasks. As one of its directors noted, “We achieved this in just four months and onboarded 1,000 users within three weeks of rollout”. Cleveland Clinic committed to a 10-year expansion deal to deploy more broadly across its hospitals. General Mills expanded the scope of its work further last quarter as its Senior Director noted, “We’re saving on average about $14 million annually, and it’s really only deployed to part of our network as we speak”.
We’re seeing rapid expansions within key customer accounts. For example, a Fortune 500 industrials company signed a three-year expansion deal, which increased the annual revenue run-rate of our work with them nearly five-fold compared to our initial engagement with them in 2022. A Fortune 100 retail company started a pilot in Q2 2023, expanded to a use-case conversion in August, then expanded its work to a $12 million ACV enterprise engagement last quarter. These are just a few examples. More and more customers are expanding their work with us due to AIP and the incredible traction our software has within their organizations.
Turning to our US government business, our revenue continued to accelerate last quarter, increasing 8% quarter-over-quarter versus 3% quarter-over-quarter in Q4, with our products every day having critical impact on current world events. We see continued demand for Mission Manager and positive reception to First Breakfast. Last quarter, we were honored the US Army awarded Palantir over $178 million to be the sole prime contractor to build a next-generation targeting node under the TITAN program. This marks the first time that a software company has won a prime contract for a hardware system and exemplifies Palantir’s position as the software prime, opening the door to vast new opportunities. It is with immense reverence that we approach building and maturing our revolutionary capabilities for our warfighters.
In our international government business, we are continuing to ramp up the critical work for delivery of the UK NHS Federated Data Platform as well as providing defense capabilities to allied partners around the world. Looking at our business and its impact broadly, I’m invigorated about the year ahead. We have never had more conviction about AIP and the power of our software, as well as our continued efforts supporting the most critical missions around the globe.
I’ll now turn it over to Shyam.
Shyam Sankar
Thanks, Ryan. The clear signal from AIP bootcamps is that AI is for builders. So many anecdotes and quotes from customers all reinforcing the same point. They are getting more done in a day or two in AIP than in a quarter or two without. We have pioneered the approach to getting beyond chat and unlocking the value of LLMs in the enterprise, taking inherently unstructured inputs that are flying around the enterprise, be it emails, slacks, PDFs, images, comments, audio, and turning them into structured actions and outputs. Taking an email from a customer requesting a different product mix and turning it into an actual inventory allocation in the ERP system of record. Taking a health claims denial and programmatically generating the documentation and supporting evidence from the clinical records and contracts. Automating P&C insurance claims processing and even in government using vision models to narrow candidate products driving food-borne outbreaks at CDC. And we have started rolling out Build with AIP, a series of developer and builder-oriented tutorials and reference implementations that enable builders to ramp quickly on the primitives and power of AIP in practical examples that unlock every employee at every customer.
Our growth is being driven by the incredible dynamism of the US commercial market and we believe the US government will follow. With this momentum, we have launched Builder Bootcamps in the US government. The US Army recently issued a memo identifying two Palantir systems, AIDP and Army Vantage as amongst the five total platforms approved for builders. The US Army’s Artificial Intelligence Integration Center, AI2C at Carnegie Mellon leverages these platforms for half of their active projects and recently built an application for the 18th Airborne Corps with OSDK. Our DoD customer recently hosted a Hackathon showing the value of the open Joint All Domain Command and Control or JADC2 SDK that we have been pioneering. One participant commented: nominating targets with GAIA Assist turns a six-hour workflow into 10 seconds.
We continue to invest in Mission Manager and we’ll be extending it to the Edge with our EdgeX infrastructure in US government. Now, customers can use their cloud instance as an integrated development environment for Edge platforms, essentially build, test, and continuously deploy and manage multi-vendor big 10 edge ecosystems. It covers everything from streaming pipelines, OSDK-backed applications, native Gotham applications, and third-party apps. We are excited with our team of Rockstar partners to deliver on the US Army’s TITAN program. This marks the first time a software company has won a hardware contract, firmly establishing the role of the software prime. We believe the core of this software, Target Workbench will be critical in every cockpit, every vehicle, and every ship.
Finally, I’d, I’d like to acknowledge the eye-watering work of our service members and our allies in meeting the moment defending against the massive Iranian attack on Israel. The Gotham investments in JADC2 performed excellently, and we are building even more even faster.
I’ll turn it over to Dave to take us through the numbers.
Dave Glazer
Thanks, Shyam. Q1 was a strong start to the year. Revenue growth accelerated to 21% year-over-year in the first quarter, driven by momentum in AIP and our US commercial business and a reacceleration in our US government business. We delivered our sixth consecutive quarter of GAAP profitability, generating a record $106 million of GAAP net income in the first quarter. We also delivered our fifth consecutive quarter of GAAP operating profit, generating a record $81 million of GAAP operating income in the quarter.
Adjusted operating margin expanded to 36% in the first quarter, continuing to highlight the strong unit economics of our business. The revenue and profitability outperformance drove a 3-point sequential increase to our Rule of 40 score from 54 in the fourth quarter of 2023 to 57 in the first quarter of 2024. This was the third consecutive quarter of an expanding Rule of 40 score.
Turning to our global top-line results. We generated $634 million in revenue in the first quarter, up 21% year-over-year and 4% sequentially, exceeding the high-end of our prior guidance. Excluding the impact of revenue from strategic commercial contracts, first quarter revenue grew 24% year-over-year and 4% sequentially. Customer count grew 42% year-over-year and 11% sequentially to 554 customers. Revenue from our largest customers continues to expand. First quarter trailing 12-month revenue from our top-20 customers increased 9% year-over-year to $55 million per customer.
Now moving to our commercial segment. First quarter commercial revenue grew 27% year-over-year and 5% sequentially to $299 million. Excluding the impact from strategic commercial contracts, first quarter commercial revenue grew 36% year-over-year and 4% sequentially. We had a very strong quarter of commercial bookings. First quarter commercial TCV booked was $505 million, representing 187% growth year-over-year. Our US commercial business continues to see unprecedented demand driven by momentum from AIP. First quarter US commercial revenue grew 40% year-over-year and 14% sequentially to $150 million, surpassing international commercial revenue for the first time. Excluding revenue from strategic commercial contracts, first quarter US commercial revenue grew 68% year-over-year and 22% sequentially.
AIP is driving both new customer conversions and existing customer expansions in US. In the first quarter, we booked $286 million of US commercial TCV, representing 131% growth year-over-year. Total remaining deal value in our US commercial business grew 74% year-over-year and 14% sequentially. Our US commercial customer count grew to 262 customers, reflecting 69% growth year-over-year and 19% growth sequentially. We generated $149 million in international commercial revenue in the first quarter, representing 16% growth year-over-year, but a 3% sequential decline as a result of continued headwinds in Europe and the revenue catch-up in Q4 that we noted last quarter. We continue to capitalize on targeted growth opportunities in Asia, the Middle East, and beyond.
Revenue from strategic commercial contracts was $24 million in the quarter. We anticipate second quarter 2024 revenue from these customers to decline to between $7 million to $9 million compared to $19 million in the second quarter of 2023. We continue to anticipate 2024 revenue from these customers to be approximately 2% of full year revenue.
Shifting to our government segment. First quarter government revenue grew 16% year-over-year and 3% sequentially to $335 million. First quarter US government revenue grew 12% year-over-year and 8% sequentially to $257 million. As Ryan noted, we’re excited to be the sole prime contractor under the TITAN program and we’ll continue pursuing other defense opportunities. We believe we’re well-positioned to see growth in our US government business over the course of 2024.
First quarter international government revenue grew 33% year-over-year and declined 9% sequentially to $79 million as a result of the revenue catch-up in Q4 that we noted last quarter and continued headwinds in Europe. First quarter TCV booked was $904 million, up 128% year-over-year. Net dollar retention was 111%, an increase of 300 basis points from last quarter. The increase was driven both by expansions at existing customers and new customers acquired in Q1 of last year. As net dollar retention does not include revenue from new customers that were acquired in the past 12 months, it does not yet fully capture the acceleration in velocity in our US commercial business over the past year.
We ended the first quarter with $4.1 billion in total remaining deal value, an increase of 22% year-over-year and 6% sequentially, and $1.3 billion in Remaining Performance Obligations, an increase of 39% year-over-year and 5% sequentially. As a reminder, RPO is primarily comprised of our commercial business as it does not take into account contracts with an initial term of less than 12 months and contractual obligations that fall beyond termination for convenience clauses, both of which are common in most of our government business.
Turning to margin and expense. Adjusted gross margin, which excludes stock-based compensation expense, was 83% for the quarter. Adjusted income from operations, which excluded stock-based compensation expense and related employer payroll taxes, was $226 million, representing an adjusted operating margin of 36% and marking the sixth consecutive quarter of expanding adjusted operating margins. Q1 adjusted expense was $408 million, up 2% sequentially and 2% year-over-year.
Turning to the balance of the year. Given our conviction in the US business, coupled with our margin expansion, we intend to boost investment in resources in the US, including an AIP in specific defense opportunities. While we expect the expenses to ramp starting in Q2 through the back half of the year, we remain focused on calibrating expense growth below revenue growth for the full year in order to continue delivering on our goals of sustained GAAP profitability and GAAP operating income.
In the first quarter, we generated GAAP operating income of $81 million, representing a 13% margin, our fifth consecutive quarter of GAAP operating income and fourth consecutive quarter of expanding GAAP operating margins. We generated first quarter GAAP net income of $106 million, representing a 17% margin, our sixth consecutive quarter of GAAP profitability. First quarter adjusted earnings per share was $0.08 and GAAP earnings per share was $0.04. Additionally, our combined revenue growth and adjusted operating margin accelerated to 57% in the first quarter, a 3 point increase to our Rule of 40 score from the prior quarter. We will continue to strive to maintain this exceptional balance of top and bottom-line performance.
Turning to our cash flow. In the first quarter, we generated $130 million in cash from operations and $149 million in adjusted free-cash flow, representing margin of 20% and 23%, respectively. In Q1, we also repurchased approximately 0.5 million shares as part of our share repurchase program. As of the end-of-the quarter, we have approximately $990 million remaining of the original authorization. We ended the quarter with $3.9 billion in cash, cash equivalents and short-term US treasury securities. We retain access to additional liquidity of up to $500 million through our revolving credit facility, which remains entirely undrawn.
Now turning to our outlook. For Q2 2024, we expect revenue of between $649 million and $653 million and adjusted income from operations of between $209 million and $213 million. For full year 2024, we are raising our revenue guidance to between $2.677 billion and $2.689 billion. We are raising our US commercial revenue guidance to in excess of $661 million, representing a growth rate of at least 45%. We are raising our adjusted income from operations guidance to between $868 million and $880 million. We continue to expect adjusted free-cash flow of between $800 million and $1 billion, and we continue to expect GAAP operating income and net income in each quarter of this year.
With that, I’ll turn it over to Alex for a few remarks and then Ana will kick-off the Q&A.
Alex Karp
Welcome to our Q1 earnings. I think it is fair to say we crushed Q1 in the US. We are on fire. You see this in our Rule of 7 — Rule of 40 being 57% you see it in — the 68% growth in US commercial if you do apples to apples, falling on 70% growth last quarter, or 71% if you do apples to apples, taking out SPAC revenue. You see it in the deal growth in the US, growing from 70 to 136 in a year. You see it in the general enthusiasm around our products, especially in commercial, but also in government, which has begun to re-accelerate. You see it in general in our customer growth in US com, which grew 69%. And again, we are growing these numbers while maintaining a Rule of 40 score of 57%, which basically means we’re doing the impossible. We are growing the company while investing in our core IP or our software development.
We are winning in the US, and then that kind of asks — then it leads to the question of why are we doing so well in the United States of America? And the main reason is we build software infrastructure that allows enterprises, both commercial and government, to move beyond chat, move beyond self-pleasuring, to actually produce things that are valuable. And whether this is tasking satellites in the commercial context, or changing margins, or changing American workers into Japanese engineers using our software platform and large language models, you can — we believe — I believe, we are the only Company in America, the only really relevant market, that will allow you to do useful things with large language models. And that is what’s generating 68% growth in US com, again, with a nascent sales force, doing it in a way that is not kind of playbook-specific, thin technology, it barely works, and you have a sales force, but with 10 years of IP that presupposed LLMs before LLMs existed.
You see the same thing in the government. Shyam and others will talk about it, but, our mission footprint, whether it’s in Ukraine, Israel, or in the United States government is stunning. There is basically no conflict in the world that is not — that where Western allies are involved, and the battlefield is involved, and the stakes are life and death, where Palantir is not the first call. And our ability to do this going forward is going to be even stronger because of the — of past investments, and also the unity of our culture and the strength of our leadership, and in general, 20 years of understanding how to do this. It is true that it is mystifying to people, including analysts, how could this possibly be working, but it is working. And this is the sixth quarter of profitability — the sixth quarter of profitability. I dare remind people that there was a time when no one thought we’d be profitable, when no one thought we could crack commercial, where revenue per person was called into question. That also grew roughly 26% year-on-year, revenue per person generated at Palantir. We do have headwinds in Europe, 16% of our business in Europe. Europe is gliding towards zero percent GDP growth over the next couple of years. That is a problem for us. There is no easy remedy for that. It is also the case, though, that US com surpass US — European commercial, and we see that as favorable. And, I, in general, think this is just Palantir’s time.
Now, there are lots of questions about why we are so active in defending the values of the West. The — our belief that the West is a superior way to live and our ways of organizing around that are the reason why our products are transformative, the reason why we have the best people in the world, the reason why a Palantir degree, as it were, is much more valuable than an Ivy League degree. Before the Ivy Leagues even embraced the thin, new, woke religion otherwise viewed as an intellectual cause, but, in fact, is a way of organizing things so that the greatest institutions of our time disappear and turn into discriminatory dysfunction. Palantir is a counterexample, and I’m super proud of the results. We are going to continue to execute, especially in the US, and I’m very happy to have you on the call.
Question-and-Answer Session
A – Ana Soro
Thanks, Alex. We’ll now turn to the questions. We received a few questions from our shareholders about AI and competitiveness. Matthew and Ryan ask, how does your AI strategy differ from your competitors?
Shyam Sankar
Well, we’re executing our strategy at an unrelenting pace here. If you go back to the launch of AIP, I discussed how we thought the models were going to commoditize and that’s really borne out. We see that underscored with Lama 370B being released now. But the real opportunity for us, as Alex made mention of is that people are using LLMs incorrectly in the enterprise. And as far as I can tell, we’re really the only company to figure it out how to help our customers get beyond chat, leveraging the investments that we’ve made in ontology, really harnessing this pattern of implementation where you’re taking unstructured inputs and turning them into structured actions and outputs that drive economic value in the enterprise. Now there’s this thing that some companies have started saying where only 10% of my customers have data that’s even AI-ready to begin with. I think that’s completely wrong. Maybe they don’t have something to sell in the present moments where they’re trying to sell the past. But if that was right, how is it that in a single-day boot camp, we’re able to add value on-top of our customers messy extant data. Ultimately, software that works, works. And to the present moment, I’m focused on helping enable builders in the context of the enterprise. I had made mention of the DoD Hackathon where a single-user built an AIP logic function surfaced in Gaia Assist that took a targeting process down from six hours to 10 seconds. More generally in commercial with build with AIP, we are releasing a slew of tutorials, quick starts and reference implementations. They’re going to help turn every — at every customer, every user into a builder to unlock the potential of what they can harness on top of AIP. And that’s the way ahead and that’s why we’re still ahead.
Alex Karp
And I would say, I don’t believe we have competitors. So, I don’t believe in the US commercial market we have competition. I don’t believe in the US government market we have competition. I don’t — I think that’s the reason Ukraine and Israel bought our product. We are differentiated because in order to actually make AI work, you need an ontology. No one has an ontology. To Shyam’s point, you have a lot of people running around saying the data isn’t ready. Of course, it’s not ready, because they don’t have foundry. If you have foundry and the ontology, it is ready. If you have foundry, or ontology in Apollo, you can actually work at the edge. If you don’t, you can’t. And outside of America, there is still — we would still have to convince people of this. Inside of America, we’re not really convincing people that we have the only thing that works. We’re showing up. We’re showing it working. And we’re saying this is what it costs, and it’s working really well. But I — currently, I don’t believe we have competition. We have a lot of people who are like the Palantir of Iowa or the Palantir of Harvard or the Palantir of Uruguay, but they’re not Palantir. And it’s going to take a long time to actually build what we have, because you’d have to actually understand what is special about the software infrastructure of having the combination of Apollo, foundry, and the ontology. And then you would have to build on top of it so that you can actually do these handoff functions with large language models. And luckily for us, there is not a consensus at the investor level, VC level, or among analysts that we have the only thing that works because — and that means there’s just going to be very little investment in copying and doing what we do. And investment in what we do outside of America would be hard to do anyway, because the ecosystem, a term I don’t particularly like, to get this done is in America. So, you would have to do this in Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley is focused on, to Shyam’s point, the wrong things.
Ana Soro
Thank you both. Our next question is from Dan with Wedbush. Dan, please turn on your camera and then you’ll receive a prompt to unmute your line.
Daniel Ives
Thanks. So, good, great quarter. My question is, can you just talk about what conversion looks like from bootcamps? And maybe just double-click, on a typical customer, what’s — now that you have more and more data points, what’s that showing you about conversion from a bootcamp to actually signing a deal?
Ryan Taylor
Yeah, absolutely. I can talk through that. So, we announced bootcamps two quarters ago as a go-to-market motion. And we’re seeing that play out. As — you see that in the results. So, in one to five days with a bootcamp, we’re able to do what used to take three months. And we’re seeing — as I talked about, we’re seeing customers shortly after bootcamp sign seven-figure deals. And we’re seeing the ability to be able to show them what they can do on the platform with real data much more quickly, and then have that monetization conversation much sooner. And so then you see that in the results, 69% growth in customers in US commercial. We closed 136 deals in Q1 this year compared to 70 deals in Q1 last year in US commercial. That’s a 94% year-over-year increase. And so we’re seeing — it’s still early in the process, and we’re seeing the results from the bootcamps and seeing that they’re working in the monetization from them.
Alex Karp
The bootcamps also have, quite frankly, another massive advantage because de facto it sets a standard that will be very hard for any other company to meet. So, even if you don’t buy our product, you de facto have locked in an idea of what’s possible. And that means that at some point when you go try your own thing and it fails, you’ve seen, okay, well, I’ve seen the art of the possible, and therefore I’m going to go buy it from Palantir at some point in the future. The bootcamp motion is an early motion, and I don’t think we would say we’ve cracked the sales motion. In fact, I think our 68% or 94% growth on deals or 69% on customer, you have to look at this as we are at the way early days of figuring out how to actually get customers to buy our product. We are good at educating customers on what is the art of the possible, and then some portion of those customers buy it. So, I expect as we get better and better at that, our numbers will increase. But it is really early days. It’s not — we’re not flawlessly executing on our sales motion. And I would say — I saw this when we built our anti-terror platform. One of the most important things we did is go out and educate the world about how you could fight terror and maintain civil liberties. And most people we actually offered our platform to did not buy the product year one, but by year five, they’d all bought it. And they bought it because they’re like, okay, well, we see how you could integrate data across disparate data sets, maintain a security model, fight terrorism, and being in conformity with the law. And even if you say, oh, I’m going to go try to do this myself. In fact, you can’t. And then that sales motion. So, the integral — the relevant integral for this is not just what you close in a quarter. It is kind of throwing a carpet on the whole market and saying, okay, well, this is the standard. If you can do better than this by yourself, build it yourself, acquire it from other people. And if you can’t, come back to us, we’re here. And that worked very, very well. I mean, almost every country in the world — not every country, but almost every country in the world that could buy our core anti-terror product, at some point did.
Ana Soro
Thank you. Our next question is from Mariana with Bank of America. Mariana, please turn on your camera and then you’ll receive a prompt to unmute your line.
Mariana Perez Mora
Good noon, everyone. So, it’s also in the line of implementation, but less about the customer because I think the demand you’re seeing is unprecedented. And we can see that you’re seeing that in both sides, like from the government side and the commercial side. What I’m really curious about is if you can give us some color around what is next in terms of actually making, tackling this demand and implementing the efforts and supporting a way larger customer base. What is hiring? What is partnerships? What is next there? And what is the most challenging from your point of view?
Shyam Sankar
Well, I can certainly take that. Maybe Ryan will have some comments on the partnership side and the growth of that ecosystem. But on the product side, this is one of the reasons I’m most excited about Build with AIP and the bootcamps that we’re running after we have deals with customers. We’re really igniting a movement within the customer in terms of unleashing their builders and tackling use cases. There’s been a shift, like, we still love to work on our customers’ hardest problems and most important use cases to deliver crushing value very quickly. But concomitant with that is how do we enable every single one of their builders to get going? And I can think of the most recent, say, two quarters, our ability to come in there, help them solve one problem, but ignite hundreds of use cases that they’re able to do on their own. So, really, even without needing additional partners, leveraging repeatable reference implementations, reference architectures, quick starts, tutorials that get them going, again, and across different — we have these for all the industries that we’re working in, for all the functions within these customers, and including in government itself.
Ryan Taylor
And on the partnership front, you see we announced our partnership with Oracle. We’re seeing hyperscalers that are realizing that in order to drive compute, you need to move beyond chat, right? You need a solution that’s taking organizations beyond their — for their AI strategy, beyond chat. We’re seeing that happen there. And we’re expanding the partnerships across the space with partners implementing at our customers as well.
Alex Karp
So, we have, across our Company for the first time, ongoing discussions with hyperscalers that are well-known and with others, where we’re basically saying, look, we have the ideal product, you have the ideal distribution, you can build on top of our product and then capture your distribution at a higher margin. We’ve been having discussions like this in Japan, across UHG, but we have our efforts to provide our core infrastructure to defense tech startups, which are going very well, simultaneously allow us to expand our core architecture, core software development into the DoD, but also make us less competitive with people, which helps us a lot. So, a lot of what slows us down is people pretending they’re competing with us. So, finding ways to build partnerships with those people so they don’t compete accelerates our revenue. And in US com, it’s a lot of what Shyam was saying. It’s — we are allowing customers to do what we had to do in the past, which is supply Palantir software engineers. There are just not that many Palantirians, so, we can’t scale. We have to allow — encourage and provide a platform where they can do it. And I would say what you see both on AIP and on foundry is de facto customers using our product pretty much on their own. And that’s, again, why that you see a revenue growth up to 26% compared to last year on per person revenue, because we’re making more money with the same number of people roughly. So — and that’s precisely because of these things that we’re doing. And so, that has a lot of benefits for us, both alignment and quality of revenue. That’s why you have this rule of — that’s why we have 57% on the Rule of 40. That’s why our revenue is growing per person. That’s why we’re — we can get away with sales that are not perfect. And we’re thinking a lot about how to do that.
Ana Soro
Thank you. Turning back to a question from our shareholders, a lot of people have noticed that Palantir is pretty outspoken when it comes to geopolitics. How has this been received?
Alex Karp
Well, it’s a complicated question because I think internally — I mean, there have been people who have disagreed. There have been people who have disagreed to the point where they’ve left. And this has gone on over the last 20 years. When we — when we’ve refused to walk away from Special Forces, the US Army, when we took over Maven, when we refused to stop working with Homeland Security, when we had discussions about which countries we’d work with and which countries we wouldn’t, more lately, in a more timely version, when we supported Ukraine, it was less controversial. When we sold Israel our software, that was arguably more controversial. The fact that we — that I take I think the central risk to Palantir and America and the world is a regressive way of thinking that is corrupting and corroding our institutions that calls itself progressive, but actually, and is called woke, but is actually a form of a thin pagan religion. That is a real danger to our society. And it is a real danger to Palantir if we allow — if we don’t discuss these things. The reason we have by far the best product offering in the world is because we have by far the best alignment around how to build software, what it means to build software, full alignment with our customers, a view that some — the Western way of living is superior and therefore it should be supported by the best products. People at this table have been in the trenches for over a decade each. Why do they stay? Why do they fight? Why do we come and do these calls? Why are we fighting for individual investors? Why do — why are we at — why do we actually care about revenue growth in quarter? I mean, honestly, everyone at this table has a lot of money. It’s like we care and we fight for these things because we believe we are fighting for a stronger, better, less discriminatory, wealthier, more open, and better society by providing the friends of the West, US industry, US government, our allies with by far superior products. And that’s, by the way, how we — and you would be — and that’s how we align with our customers. By the way, I have customers who disagree with me, but they sure as hell know I’m telling the truth about what we believe. And probably more importantly, they know we’re not sophists. They know we believe in things. And that’s why we fight for this culture and that’s why we fight for our products. And that’s why our products are growing. Again, you can repeat all these numbers over and over again. How do you get 68% growth in US com with a 57% Rule of 40? How do you nearly double your customer account, your deal count, your customer count, all these numbers? You do it by having full alignment and the best products in the world. Or you can do it by having weird things that barely work and trying to manipulate clients into buying your product until they realize it barely works because it’s thin and of no value. And that’s just not how we roll at Palantir. So, it has been really — and by the way, on the last note, how do we have the best investors in the world, especially individual investors? Why do they stick with us when times were hard? Why do they fight for Palantir? Why do they — every time someone writes something unique, Palantir’s gone MAGA. Palantir doesn’t have a product. Palantir doesn’t have margins. I’m sure this quarter, Palantir’s growth is decelerating despite the fact it’s obviously being — we’re obviously crushing it in America. Palantir is too crazy. Palantir will never be profitable. Palantir can’t IPO. Palantir is too weird and odd to produce something that will be disruptive. We knew it was bullshit. The people who are out on the front fighting against that BS, fighting against lazy, inept, discriminatory in the sense that there’s ignorance, people maligning Palantir do it in great part because they believe that we are fighting for them, and we are, and we’re fighting for ourselves, and that’s why we have such a great Company. So, thank you.
Ana Soro
Thank you. That concludes Q&A for today’s call.
