PLTRPalantir Technologies Inc.

Palantir sells data-analysis platforms to governments and corporations, and its revenue rests on long contracts rather than user counts.

Two segments. Government — defence, intelligence, healthcare: contracts run for years, competitors are few, and entry requires clearances and a reputation that cannot be bought. Commercial — industry, energy, finance: here the company sells a platform for assembling models and applications over the customer's own data.

Deployment was historically slow and expensive, with engineers stationed at the customer's site, and that capped growth. The answer was short pilots in which a customer builds a working prototype within days; they brought an influx of new customers and visibly accelerated the commercial segment.

Valuation is the central argument: it rests on the expectation that the platform becomes the standard way enterprises deploy models. Risks are revenue concentration among large customers, the government segment's dependence on budget cycles, and generous stock-based compensation diluting shareholders.