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.
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.
