In This Story
Defense-tech company Palantir Technologies beat analyst expectations for revenue in its first-quarter earnings report Monday, citing demand by U.S. companies for its bootcamps and technology products.
The company reported $634 million in revenue, while expectations were $615 million, according to FactSet. Its revenue grew 21% year-over-year and 4% quarter-over-quarter, the report said.
Palantir also reported its commercial revenue in the U.S. grew 40% year-over-year, while its quarter-over-quarter revenue rose 14% to $150 million. Overall, the company’s commercial revenue grew 27% year-over-year to $299 million. The company’s adjusted earnings per share (EPS) met expectations of eight cents.
“Our business is now growing at a scale and pace that even our most ardent advocates would have been hard pressed to say was likely, or even possible,” Palantir CEO Alex Karp wrote in a letter to shareholders, adding that the company’s $106 million profit for the quarter ending March 31 is “the largest quarterly profit in our company’s twenty-year history.”
Palantir stock fell about 8% in after-hours trading following its earnings release, after rising by about the same amount during trading Monday before it reported results.
On a first quarter earnings call with investors, Karp said he believes Palantir is the only company doing useful things with large language models (LLMs), as reflected in its earnings report.
Palantir’s technology caters to military and intelligence agencies. The company closed 87 deals worth at least $1 million in the first quarter, including 27 that were at least worth $5 million and 15 that were worth at least $10 million, according to its earnings report.
The company’s U.S. government revenue grew 12% year-over-year to $257 million, and its overall government revenue growth grew 16% year-over-year to $335 million. In the first quarter of 2024, Palantir was awarded $178 million by the U.S. Army to develop deep-sensing capabilities for an AI-powered vehicle.
“Warfare in this century will continue to be transformed by software,” Karp wrote in his letter. The platforms in use by our defense and intelligence partners present a very real threat to the survival of our enemies. But those same software systems may also make possible and indeed hasten the beginning of the end of an era of total and indiscriminate war.“
For the second quarter, Palantir said it expects revenue to fall between $649 million and $653 million. For the full year, the company expects revenue of between $2.68 billion and $2.69 billion. It also expects adjusted income from operations to be between $868 million and $880 million in 2024. Palantir said it’s continuing to “invest aggressively” in its artificial intelligence platform, AIP.