19 former Palantir employees now heading up startups of their own

Big data analytics titan Palantir, which was founded in 2003 by a group of entrepreneurs including infamous investor, Trump supporter and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, has already earned a reputation for spinning out founders in Silicon Valley — but the company has also become a key line on the resume of many of Europe’s tech set. 

Palantir makes software for companies and governments to analyse data, and is controversial for helping intelligence agencies like the US’s CIA with surveillance. The company also works with a host of other industries like consumer goods and cryptocurrency. Palantir’s name is a reference to the seeing stones in JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings — crystal orbs that enable the user to surveil and communicate with people in faraway places.   

The US-based company has offices across Europe, including London, Munich, Paris, Rome, Oslo, Norway, Madrid, Zurich and Stockholm. 

Palantir went public in 2020, and has recently seen its shares on a tear — with the big data company’s stock price soaring more than 400% in the last year. Like other big companies including Arm or Klarna, Palantir has churned out numerous employees who have struck out on their own to build or work at startups. 

Sifted tracked down a number of ex-Palantir employees (who held full-time roles at the company) who’ve founded their own startups in Europe. Sifted reached out to or pulled from public reporting for everyone on the list; some didn’t respond. If you know of someone missing, please get in touch: anne@sifted.eu. 

Will Blyth — Arondite

Blyth spent 12 years in the UK military before joining Palantir, where he worked as a deployment strategist implementing Palantir’s software with defence customers, as well as in a business development strategy role. After two and a half years, Blyth left for a partnerships role at German AI defence tech Helsing; in 2023, he started his own company Arondite, where he’s currently the CEO and cofounder alongside ex-BAE Systems engineer Rob Underhill. Arondite is a defence tech based in London that is building AI tools and software to better connect humans with robotics, unmanned systems and sensors. 

The startup raised an undisclosed amount of pre-seed funding in 2024 and will raise again in 2025, Blyth tells Sifted. It’s released its first product — its flagship AI software platform Cobalt — and won multiple defence contracts, Blyth says. 

Palantir is a “great training ground for founding a company,” says Blyth, which “gives people the opportunity to get lots of practice at figuring out what’s valuable to a customer, quickly delivering a product that offers a solution and then iterating on that product fast; power and responsibility is pushed to the lowest levels and people are trusted to execute.”

Arnaud Drizard, Robin Costé and Sebastien Duc — Bastion 

The trio of ex-Palantir employees founded their startup Bastion in Paris in 2023. Bastion helps startups and medium-sized companies with security and compliance, offering a solution to combine things like audit support, continuous monitoring and penetration testing. 

It raised €2.5m in seed funding from Kima Ventures, Frst, Global Founders Capital and Motier Ventures in early 2023, and Drizard tells Sifted the startup hopes to raise its Series A in the second half of 2025. He says that Bastion is seeing “profitable and fast-paced growth”. 

At Palantir, Drizard led customer engagements and business development for France (he worked at Palantir for nearly seven years); Duc was most recently the head of cyber at Palantir, where he worked for six years; and Costé was an engineer for nearly four years. 

Of his time at Palantir, Drizard says “navigating high-stakes, dynamic settings taught me to focus on execution over hierarchy, fostering adaptability and resilience.” 

Mati Staniszewski — ElevenLabs

Staniszewski was a deployment strategist at Palantir for nearly four years before he left to cofound ElevenLabs in early 2022. The New York- and London-based company converts text to voice using AI, and raised a $180m Series C round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Iconiq Growth last month, with other investors NEA and World Innovation Lab participating. Last year it raised an $80m round which pushed its valuation to £1bn+, giving it unicorn status. 

According to LinkedIn, ElevenLabs has more than 200 employees. 

Wiem Gharbi and Tamar Gomez — Ankar AI

Gharbi and Gomez cofounded London-based Ankar AI in early 2024. The startup provides R&D teams and inventors with AI tools to help them with things like patent researching, filing and licensing. The startup raised funding in January of 2024 and plans to raise again this year, Gharbi tells Sifted. 

Prior to founding Ankar, Gharbi was a deployment strategist at Palantir for about six and a half years; Gomez was also a deployment strategist for about three years and then worked in product management at Helsing before cofounding Ankar. 

“Palantir’s company culture allowed space for intellectual discourse, which is a talent magnet,” Gharbi says. “Palantir was full of independent thinkers and mission driven people that liked to build.” 

Ash Edwards, Taylor Young and Alex Goddijn — Fern Labs

The trio of Palantir alumni started Fern Labs in June of last year. Edward spent nearly three years as an engineer and tech lead at the US company focusing on machine learning systems and agents; Young was also a tech lead for three and a half years; and Goddijn was an engineer for over four years. 

London-based Fern Labs lets companies embed AI agents to help automate difficult or open-ended processes; CEO Edwards has said it aims to see how much of a company can be run by AI. So far, Fern Labs has raised $3m in pre-seed funding led by UK VC Air Street Capital. 

“I think Palantir is pretty unparalleled when it comes to giving you helpful experience for founding. You get a constant stream of real-life, hard problems that you solve with a really powerful tool (Foundry),” Edwards tells Sifted. “It’s high-ownership and you are trained to constantly zero in on what is actually valuable/real.” 

Ethan Waldie — Ferry

After spending almost four years as a deployment strategist at Palantir, Waldie left to create his startup Ferry in 2023 with cofounder Dominic Aits. The London- and Toronto-based company is a digital manufacturing operations platform, helping customers unify industrial data across different systems — deploying AI applications onto the factory floor. 

Waldie says the startup has raised seed funding. He declined to comment on revenues, but said that it is “deployed into some of the world’s largest manufacturing enterprises”. 

“Working across such a diverse set of customers, Palantir was a first-class education in understanding the complex challenges organisations face unlocking value from their critical operational datasets,” Waldie says. 

Leopold von Waldthausen and Marvin Bornstein — Zeit AI

Following a stint of more than three-years at Palantir as a deployment strategist, project lead and principal, von Waldthausen founded Zeit AI in July of 2024 with cofounder Marvin Bornstein, who spent five years as an engineer, technical lead and dev lead at Palantir. 

The startup is based out of Munich and San Francisco, and was part of SF-based accelerator Y Combinator’s spring 2024 batch. It uses AI to help enterprises glean insights into data from spreadsheets. 

Zeit AI has thus far raised an unannounced “seven-figure dollar sum”, von Waldthausen says. The startup has “six-figure annual revenue” with a “large handful” of customers, he says, adding that the company aims to become profitable this month. 

Amos Wittenberg and Phillip Marks — Unwritten

Wittenburg spent nearly four years at Palantir, working as a deployment strategist in sustainability and ESG; Marks also worked on climate projects at Palantir for three years, according to LinkedIn. The pair cofounded Unwritten — formerly Dovetail Finance — in 2022. The London-based startup helps investors measure how climate change and environmental risks may impact their portfolios.  

It raised $3.5m in seed funding in the spring of 2024 from investors including Connect Ventures and Planet A.

Dimitris Nikolaou and Youssef Rizk — Wondercraft

Ex-Palantir engineers Dimitris Nikolaou and Youssef Rizk cofounded AI audio startup Wondercraft with ex-Spotify sales, marketing and partnerships director Oskar Serrander. The startup enables users to create audio like podcasts and ads from text.

The London-based company launched in beta in 2023 and raised $3m in funding in early 2024 from investors including US VC Will Ventures, Diary of a CEO podcast star Steven Bartlett, Y Combinator and startup ElevenLabs, on whose tech Wondercraft was built. The startup participated in YC’s spring 2022 batch. 

Craig Massie — Ameba

Massie cofounded London-based Ameba, which helps companies manage their supply chain data, in the summer of 2023. Previously he was a software engineer and product manager at Palantir for two and a half years.

Ameba has raised accelerator funding from Entrepreneur First, a $1.7m pre-seed round led by Visionaries and $7.1m in a seed funding round led by Hedosophia. Massie says it isn’t planning to fundraise again anytime soon. 

“Working at Palantir helped a tonne,” says Massie of his founder experience. “The environment at Palantir is super entrepreneurial, there really just seems to be three paths for engineers leaving Palantir: found something, join something early on or go to the dark-side and join a hedge fund.” 

Francisco Ferreira — DataLinks

After spending nine years at Palantir working between product development and commercial engagements, Ferreira left in early 2024 to start his own company DataLinks, according to his LinkedIn and website. The startup enables users to upload reports and data and connects it with other relevant data sets. Ferreira is based in Zurich, while his cofounder Andrzej Grzesik is based in London.

Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/palantir-founders-startups-europe/