9 startups from Palantir alumni you need to know

Last week, I published a deep exploration into Palantir and its founder factory and how the company’s power and success can be explained by its ability to attract elite talent and how it empowers them to develop their skills and learn new ones in the projects they pursue. That talent then goes on to found their own startups, invariably seeking to address hard, intractable problems much as they did in their work at Palantir.

(In the few days since I published my first story, I’ve found another 21 former Palantir employees turned founders, bringing what was already the largest public dataset of these people to 335. If you haven’t already, check it out here.)

There are a number of high-profile companies founded by Palantir alums that many people have heard of. These include:

• Anduril, the defense contractor ($30.5 billion valuation), cofounded by Brian Schimpf, Matt Grimm, and Trae Stephens;
• Kalshi, the predictions market ($11 billion valuation), cofounded by Tarek Mansour;
• Eleven Labs, the voice AI platform ($6.6 billion valuation), cofounded by Mati Staniszewski;
• Handshake, the marketplace for early-career workers, colleges, and employers which has recently focused more on matching specialized talent with AI training opportunities ($3.3 billion valuation), cofounded by Garrett Lord; and
• Partiful, the planning tool for IRL experiences ($400 million valuation), cofounded by Shreya Murthy and Joy Tao.

But there are so many fascinating stories among the cadre of startups founded and led by Palantir alums. The nine companies showcased below, which span healthcare, government services, cybersecurity, law, clean energy, hardware development, and not-for-profits, exemplify the power of being acculturated to finding a big, hard problem—and having the skills to tackle it.

Angle Health

Palantir alum founders: Ty Wang (CEO), Anirban Gangopadhyay

Other founders: None

What Angle does: AI-native healthcare benefits platform, particularly serving employees of small and medium-size businesses

Employees: Approximately 100

Funding: $197 million raised to date, including a $134 million Series B in December 2025 led by Portage, with funding also from Blumberg Capital, Y Combinator, and others

Secret sauce: Creating a full-stack solution. To work toward achieving the company’s goal of changing how “people approach and access healthcare,” as Wang says, and “democratize access to the kinds of modern healthcare services . . . that are still not available to a lot of the people that really need them,” Angle had to rebuild “the technology infrastructure that powers the way that the vast majority of Americans access healthcare today, which is through their health plan.”

Angle has centralized data assets and focused on enabling AI-driven, human-in-the-loop workflows across its products and operations. That allows it to offer such things as digital behavioral health programs or digital pharmacies, for example—newer services that have become more routine for large employers to include in their health plans—and that can reduce the overall cost of care for the thousands of small businesses that Angle serves.

One key learning from Palantir: Gangopadhyay explains that Angle’s culture encourages “a lot of slow thinking and having discourse” on a monthly basis to develop a clear plan, and then “we’re very intentionally head-in-the-ground and hands-to-keyboards executing.” Although Palantir itself is not structured this way in terms of a “monthly sync,” he adds that “we’re very light on meetings. We leave the individuals to execute in their own way.” That is spiritually aligned with how Palantir operates.

Avandar Labs

Palantir alum founders: Pablo Sarmiento (CEO and CTO)

Other founders: None

What Avandar does: Software for social enterprises and nonprofits to manage their data

Employees: One

Funding: Bootstrapped. In fact, Sarmiento says he will not raise equity-based funding, choosing instead to pursue non-dilutive capital sources, including revenue-based financing to align better with the goals of socially focused companies.

Secret sauce: “Think about it,” says Sarmiento, “we shouldn’t be building the software we need to fight a crisis during the crisis,” referring to COVID as well as the work he did after he left Palantir, at Zenysis Technologies, helping create software so that the National Health Institute in Mozambique could successfully fight a cholera epidemic. “It should exist.”

Avandar Labs lets not-for-profits and social enterprises build a unified data platform to integrate and analyze an organization’s program data. (It’s currently in beta but when complete, Sarmiento says it’ll be “customizable to any mission.”) The platform’s core technological difference is that it was built from the start for social sector use cases, such as “ensuring it can support epidemic response, humanitarian emergencies, and cross-sector coordination.” He promises it’ll be far cheaper than any alternatives, too.

One key learning from Palantir: “Bias towards action.”

Chapter

Palantir alum founders: Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz

Other founders: Corey Metzman, former Presidential candidate (and current Ohio gubernatorial candidate), Vivek Ramaswamy

What Chapter does: AI to help American seniors find the optimal Medicare plan at the lowest cost

Employees: Approximately 200

Funding: $186 million raised to date, most recently at a valuation of approximately $1.5 billion. Investors include Stripes, XYZ, and Susa Ventures, among others.

Secret sauce: Using AI to help seniors navigate Medicare. Chapter’s recommendation engine identifies which of the 24,000 Medicare options that exist is right for an individual customer, taking into account their doctors, prescriptions regimen, usual pharmacies, the benefits that are most important to them, their ability and willingness to pay, and more. “Each one of those inputs is a huge data problem in and of its own,” Blumenfeld-Gantz notes. It has an app that can determine from a picture of a user’s Medicare card which plan they’re on and then “curate every single item that’s eligible for your plan” and check them out without a litany of phone calls, he adds. Speaking of calls, Chapter ingests every phone communication its brokers have to assess if they’re making high-quality, compliant recommendations and offer real-time feedback.

One key learning from Palantir: Being relentless. Working in a regulated space, where you have to get federal and state licenses and get licensed by insurance carriers in every state you operate, “it’s just not accepting no,” says Blumenfeld-Gantz. “[You have to be] really annoying to state departments of insurance until they take your call and move your paperwork forward. The way I think about it is that you have to make it less work for them to do what you want them to do. Status quo, the easier thing is for them to do nothing. So you have to change the status quo so it’s easier for them to do something than nothing.”

Draftwise

Palantir alum founders: James Ding (CEO), Emre Ozen

Other founders: Ozan Yalti (former senior associate at the global law firm Clifford Chance)

What Draftwise does: AI software for law firms and in-house legal teams to automate contract drafting, review, and negotiation

Employees: Approximately 60

Funding: $28 million raised to date, from Index Ventures, Y Combinator, and others

Secret sauce: “Every other well-funded legal tech company in the space is building an application layer tool trying to put LLMs inside of bespoke interfaces to try to increase productivity for lawyers,” says Ding. “Draftwise is a data platform. We started by recognizing that the pain point we wanted to solve was one where the challenge is that big-ticket deals require data, and if you can’t have the data, you can’t make good decisions. We started from that foundation, integrating data across a variety of silos, bringing it together, and shaping it into an ontology. Then we also happen to have interfaces to serve that data to people inside their workflow.”

For example, Ding cites an add-in for Microsoft Word that Draftwise made. “You’re drafting a contract, you’re negotiating financial covenants, Draftwise can pull together into a single view all the data you need to actually make the decision of what covenants to give.”

One key learning from Palantir: “The thing I wanted to bring was immense agency, immense accountability, a sense of high integrity,” says Ding, “but also high effort where we’re just getting things done, we’re doing it right, and we’re doing the best we can.”

Fourth Age

Palantir alum founders: Zach Romanow, plus founding partners Jesse Rickard, Pete Mills, and Samuel Tarng 

Other founders: None

What Fourth Age does: Specialized forward-deployed engineering for Palantir customers to build complex applications on top of Palantir’s platforms

Employees: More than 50

Funding: Bootstrapped

Secret sauce: “My first customer is really the engineers,” says Romanow, “the best and brightest FDEs, or the people that could become the best and brightest FDEs if they’re in the right place and have the right teams around them. . . . hire the best possible people that at scale provide differentiated outcomes for customers, and the customers will pay you accordingly.”

One key learning from Palantir: “If you have a very, very high bar for the people . . . then A players want to join the A team,” Romanow says. “Let’s really stay true to our principles of what we know great looks like.”

Manifest

Palantir alum founders: Daniel Bardenstein (CEO); Marc Frankel (former CEO)

Other founders: N/A

What Manifest does: Software and AI “bill of materials” to protect everything from healthcare systems to military aircraft

Employees: Approximately 30

Funding: $21 million raised to date from such investors as AE Industrial Partners (Boeing’s venture arm), Palumni VC, XYZ, and others

Secret sauce: Provides both vendors and buyers with visibility into the provenance of the elements in the software and AI they depend on to eliminate the risk of introducing a potentially calamitous vulnerability. “Software is the only thing that we buy that you don’t get to know what’s in it,” says Frankel. “Everything else in our lives comes with an ingredients list.”

One key learning from Palantir: “Low ego, high ops tempo.”

Nira Energy

Palantir alum founders: Andy Chen (CTO)

Other founders: Chris Ariante (CEO, ex-Exxon Mobil), Andrew Martin

What Nira does: Software for clean energy developers, data centers, and utilities that helps them understand where there’s available capacity on the electric grid for new projects

Employees: Approximately 30

Funding: $65.5 million from Energize Capital, Y Combinator, and others

Secret sauce: Focusing on “one of the most painful roadblocks to building” renewables, the hidden pain point impeding the goal to “accelerate America’s power grid to be fossil free as quickly as possible,” as Chen says. That is what’s known in the energy business as “interconnection”—adding renewable projects to the grid. Nira’s built mapping tools to help developers identify sites with capacity and another one to estimate costs while a project is in queue to come online.

One key learning from Palantir: “Learning about transmission planning is a critical part to being successful at Nira,” Chen says. “If you’re not interested, you’re not going to be able to learn it. One thing that’s similar culturally between Palantir and the people we have here is this fundamental curiosity and willingness to learn about totally random stuff that will never help you in a future job, but you want to do it because you’re fundamentally interested in it.” Chen adds that he’s now hiring for a forward deployed engineering role.

Nominal

Palantir alum founders: Jason Hoch

Other founders: Cameron McCord (CEO, former Naval submarine officer, ex-Anduril), Bryce Strauss (ex-Lockheed Martin)

What Nominal does: Software to help hardware engineering teams, people who build such things as nuclear fusion reactors and satellites, test and deliver complex systems faster

Employees: Approximately 100

Funding: $102.5 million raised to date, from Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed, Lux Capital, Founders Fund, and others

Secret sauce: Speed and solving the data challenges that hardware manufacturers face. When mechanical and electrical engineers work on hard hardware problems, “they [also] have software problems, they have data infrastructure problems,” Hoch says. “We’re speeding up the workflows. We’re increasing the maximum complexity of what the hardware engineers and our customers can accomplish. When they finish a task or a simulation, they don’t need to crack open Claude Code to start understanding their data. It’s just right there in front of them. They’re able to ask the hard physics and engineering questions of the data.” That’s the speed. For that data issue, “when you’re building complex software systems,” Hoch explains, “you have this incredible toolkit of SaaS companies that have been building ways to make your job better for 30 years.” Hardware engineers, by contrast, “You’ll have 10,000 data points a second, a million data points a second coming off of a sensor,” meaning that the nature of helping them process that data is not a solved problem.

One key learning from Palantir: “Remaining customer obsessed, remaining technically obsessed. Our customers are wildly technical. The things that I would have to teach people 12 years ago when I was onsite with a customer, these people already know it. It’s keeping us honest to making sure we’re really staying at the cutting edge.”

Sage

Palantir alum founders: Raj Mehra (CEO), Matt Lynch (CTO)

Other founders: Ellen Johnston (chief product officer)

What Sage does: A hardware and software platform to deliver better eldercare, particularly in assisted living facilities

Employees: More than 100

Funding: $59 million raised to date, from IVP, Friends & Family Capital, Maveron, and others

Secret sauce: Building hardware to collect the critical data to support its software. “How do we give caregivers better tools to care for residents? How do we give residents of these communities tools to call for help and get help when they need it?” asks Mehra. Realizing that existing systems weren’t measuring relevant data, Sage has built Core, which tracks nurse calls and helps caregivers manage tasks, which operators can then “use to improve quality of care and caregiver performance,” Lynch notes. 

It also built Detect, which is AI-powered fall detection that enables care providers to respond proactively to those kind of emergency events. “We can measure and pull in all of the telemetry from the physical devices that we’re deploying,” Mehra adds. “Based on all of that, you can then synthesize it and provide value to folks up the value chain.”

One key learning from Palantir: “One of us is responsible for every single person we bring in,” says Mehra. One of Palantir’s founders interviewed every hire for a long time. “We haven’t departed from that,” he continues, “and I don’t think we ever should because it’s how we keep the culture intact.” Adds Lynch: “Then, if we make a mistake, we own it . . . when bets don’t pay off, we can’t sacrifice the culture for that.”