Now this is one company I don't understand. From everything I read, it sounds like a technology consulting company (which is going to have huge scaling issues). Yet it raises money like a software startup. What's going on?
> CEO Alex Karp announced in 2013 that the company would not be pursuing an IPO, as going public would make “running a company like ours very difficult.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies
11 years old, 1500 employees, never planning to go public. At some point you have to stop calling it a "startup".
A cynical thought would be that perhaps they don't want to have to sell to a company in an industry where they already have a reputation. That may by no means be true, perhaps instead they just don't have the attention span to really product-ize a solution instead of making one-offs. Or something else, either way, it smells of their typical cultish marketing.