Some of the buzziest startups in Silicon Valley share something in common: their founders once worked at Palantir. 

The founders lean on other ex-Palantir executives and engineers for support and financing, tapping the network for hiring and funding. Venture-capital firms have sprung up whose mission is to invest in companies founded by people with Palantir experience.  

Palantir, the data analysis firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, is best known as the rare Silicon Valley company that works with the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, including with the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. It also has many commercial clients. Its stock has quintupled in the last 12 months.

In conversation, alumni will refer to themselves as the Palantir mafia. The invitation to a panel last October, hosted by venture fund South Park Commons in partnership with Palantir, advertised that “several members of the ‘Palantir Mafia’” would be speaking. There are WhatsApp groups and Signal chats for alumni to keep in touch—one is called “Palantir Pals.”

Alumni have either started or are leading more than 350 tech companies, and at least a dozen have been valued at over $1 billion, says Luba Lesiva, who was head of investor relations at Palantir from 2014 to 2016. Lesiva runs a venture firm called Palumni VC, a play on the words Palantir alumni, which invests in startups founded or led by ex-Palantir employees. 

“These engineers are dropped either in the middle of the desert or an office park in the Midwest with a server rack and a screwdriver,” says Lesiva. “Wherever they’re sent, no one really wants to be there, but it’s the high capacity for work and pain. They can chew glass.”

Ross Fubini, founder of venture firm XYZ Capital, made an investor pitch deck in 2017 where he predicted that Palantir would become the next “founder mafia.” 

“VC interest in the Palantir mafia has increased in the last few years but it’s been frenetic this last year,” said Fubini, who has invested in over a dozen startups founded by Palantir alumni. “They’re just starting exceptional companies in hard industries.”

Palantir is known for producing good operators. A big appeal of the Palantir alumni is their common strategy, developed at Palantir, called “forward-deployed engineering,” which is basically a glorified term for consulting. 

Palantir software engineers often travel to their clients and embed themselves. Engineers can find themselves in conflict zones or locales as varied as Omaha or Oman. Once there, they use technological acumen to help solve their clients’ thorniest and most vexing problems.

Barry McCardel was a forward-deployed engineer at Palantir from 2014 to 2018. During his last two years at the company, he helped build a real-time monitoring platform for oil and gas giant BP to help the company analyze its oil wells around the world. He traveled every other week to places like Anchorage and Houston, Scotland and Azerbaijan. 

“The magic of Palantir was we took proper software engineers, the type who had offers from Google and Facebook, and put them on planes and sent them to where the customers were,” he said. “That’s not for everyone, and that’s ok.”

A year after leaving Palantir, McCardel started building Hex Technologies, a data-analysis startup in 2019. To staff up, he and his co-founders—also ex-Palantir—turned to the mafia. That year, he went to a Halloween party of Palantir alumni in San Francisco where he, dressed as a grizzly bear, reconnected with a former co-worker, dressed as a bumblebee. He hired him as Hex’s founding designer. 

In a little over five years at Palantir between 2012 to 2017, Nick Noone led the company’s military special-operations deployment projects and traveled to Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Germany as a Palantir engineer.

When Noone left in 2017 to start what would become Peregrine Technologies, a data-intelligence platform that now sells primarily to local government and law enforcement agencies, he applied that forward-deployed engineering approach.

In 2017, Noone and his co-founder embedded themselves with the police department of San Pablo, a city about a 40-minute drive from San Francisco. The initial scope of the work was to enhance the agency’s data-analytics tools. But soon, they were pulled in to help investigators solve a homicide case. They pieced together information from cellphone towers, historical police records and license plate data to help detectives create a timeline of where the murder suspects had been during the time of the crime. 

During the resulting murder trial, Noone was called as an expert witness, and the suspects were found guilty. This experience in assisting investigators became the bedrock of Peregrine. Earlier this year, the company began landing federal contracts. 

Peregrine closed a round of financing in March led by Sequoia Capital, valuing the company at $2.5 billion. 

Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz worked on agricultural, military and national-security projects for Palantir for over six years, deploying with the Marines in deserts in the Middle East and East Asia, before starting Chapter, a Medicare and retirement-technology company. 

Blumenfeld-Gantz co-founded Chapter with Vivek Ramaswamy, biotech entrepreneur and Ohio governor candidate. Thiel is an investor and served on its board of directors for just under two years. The company today is valued at around $1.5 billion.

“I’m proud of the work I did for the government while at Palantir,” Blumenfeld-Gantz says. “I think most people who join Palantir can handle the nuances of the company.”

One of the highest-profile companies tapping into the Palantir alumni network is Anduril Industries, one of the few privately held tech companies to land contracts with the Defense Department. It includes three former Palantir employees on its founding team: Trae Stephens, Matt Grimm and Brian Schimpf. The company, which makes software and hardware products and systems for national-security operations, was last valued in June at $30.5 billion. Stephens said in a TV interview with Bloomberg Technology the round was eight to 10 times oversubscribed.

Last summer, Stephens, in his role as an investor in Thiel’s venture firm Founders Fund, hosted a luxury camping trip in Sonoma, Calif., for Palantir alumni. Stephens kicked off the two-day trip with brief opening remarks that touched on nostalgia from his days at Palantir, according to people familiar with the matter. 

Among the couple dozen attendees who floated down the Russian River and went paintballing that weekend were founders, investors and operators in tech, including Ryan Beiermeister, vice president of public policy at OpenAI. 

Other names that frequently come up when alumni talk about the network include 8VC venture capitalist and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale; Garry Tan, venture capitalist and chief executive 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 Partiful which is popular among Gen Z users, was recently criticized on social media for working at Palantir due to its 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 that helped me learn what to do (and not do) when running a company,” Murthy said in an email statement. “I left and chose to build something different, aligned with my values and passions.”

“We do recognize that it can come with baggage,” said Pratap Ranade, an engineer who joined Palantir when it acquired his first startup in 2016. He says he’s proud of his work there and doesn’t hide his experience.

Ranade stayed at Palantir for nearly two years as a forward-deployed engineer and after leaving founded his second startup, Arena. The company makes AI-driven software to assist hardware engineers to test and fix machines, akin to J.A.R.V.I.S.—the fictional AI software that Tony Stark from Marvel Comics makes to power the Iron Man suit, among other hardware products.