Compare / Palantir vs Pinterest
AT A GLANCE
FUNDING HISTORY
Palantir
BUSINESS MODEL
Palantir
Palantir's business model is enterprise software — specifically, large multi-year contracts with governments and corporations. Contracts typically start at $1-5 million and can scale to hundreds of millions annually for large government agencies.
The sales process is uniquely intensive. Palantir deploys "forward-deployed engineers" (FDEs) who embed directly with customers for months, configuring the platform for specific use cases.
This hands-on approach is expensive but creates deep integration that makes switching nearly impossible. Once Palantir is embedded in an organization's workflows, it's practically permanent.
Revenue split has shifted over time. Government contracts (US and allied nations) historically dominated, but commercial revenue has been growing faster.
By 2024, commercial revenue approached 45% of total. Annual revenue exceeded $2.8 billion.
The company has been profitable since 2023.
Pinterest makes money through advertising — specifically through "Promoted Pins" that look nearly identical to organic content. This is the magic of Pinterest's business model: ads don't interrupt the experience because the experience IS discovering products and ideas.
A promoted pin for a kitchen knife set appears right alongside organic pins of kitchen designs. The user doesn't distinguish between "ad" and "content" because both serve the same purpose.
Shopping ads are the fastest-growing segment. Brands upload their product catalogs, Pinterest matches products to user searches and boards, and users can buy directly through the platform or click through to the retailer's site.
Pinterest gets paid per click or per thousand impressions.
Revenue reached $3.65 billion in 2024, up from $3.05 billion the year before, and 2024 was its first genuinely profitable year. Average revenue per user is growing but still well below Meta's — the upside is enormous if Pinterest can close that gap.
HOW THEY STARTED
Palantir
Palantir was born from the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Peter Thiel — PayPal co-founder and contrarian investor — realized that the same fraud-detection algorithms PayPal used to catch financial criminals could help intelligence agencies catch terrorists.
The US government had mountains of data but terrible tools for connecting the dots.
Thiel co-founded Palantir in 2003 with Alex Karp (a Stanford law graduate who then took a PhD in social theory at Goethe University in Frankfurt, studying under Jürgen Habermas), Joe Lonsdale (a Stanford student who'd worked at Clarium Capital), Stephen Cohen (an engineer), and Nathan Gettings (a Clarium colleague). They named it after the palantíri in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings — the seeing stones that let you view distant events.
The CIA's venture arm, In-Q-Tel, was the first investor and first customer simultaneously. The initial product, Palantir Gotham, was built specifically for intelligence analysts who needed to find connections across massive, messy datasets — linking phone records, financial transactions, travel data, and classified intelligence into a single coherent picture.
The company operated in extreme secrecy for its first decade, with most employees unable to discuss what they actually built.
Ben Silbermann was a former Google ad operations employee who quit in 2008 to build apps. His first attempt was an iPhone app called Tote — essentially a mobile catalog that let women browse and bookmark products from fashion retailers.
Nobody downloaded it. But Silbermann noticed something in the data: users were saving products obsessively.
The collecting behavior was more interesting than the shopping behavior.
He teamed up with Paul Sciarra, a classmate from Yale, and Evan Sharp, a designer who was studying architecture at Columbia. Together they built Pinterest — a visual bookmarking tool that let people "pin" images from around the internet to organized boards.
Think of it as a digital mood board that anyone could make.
Pinterest launched as an invite-only beta in March 2010. Growth was painfully slow at first.
Silbermann personally wrote to the first 5,000 users, giving them his phone number and asking what they wanted. The early community was overwhelmingly women interested in home decor, fashion, recipes, and DIY projects.
By 2011, Time magazine named Pinterest one of the 50 best websites. By 2012, it was the fastest site in history to reach 10 million unique monthly visitors.
HOW THEY GREW
Palantir
Palantir's growth strategy for two decades was simple: get inside the US government, prove indispensable, and expand from there. CIA led to NSA.
NSA led to the Army. The Army led to the Air Force.
Each agency saw what the others were doing and wanted it.
The AIP launch in 2023 was the commercial growth inflection point. By integrating large language models into the platform, Palantir made its data analytics accessible to non-technical users.
A supply chain manager could ask questions in plain English and get answers from their data. This dramatically expanded the potential user base within existing customers and attracted new commercial clients.
"Boot camps" became the commercial go-to-market innovation. Palantir runs intensive multi-day workshops where potential customers bring their actual data and problems, and Palantir engineers build working prototypes on the spot.
Companies leave with tangible proof of value, which accelerates the sales cycle dramatically.
Pinterest grew organically through women sharing boards with each other. The weddings use case was the killer app — brides-to-be would create boards for dresses, venues, flowers, and invitations, then share them with their wedding parties.
That viral loop drove millions of signups.
SEO is the secret weapon. Pinterest pages rank extremely well in Google Image Search.
Someone searching "modern living room ideas" often sees Pinterest results on page one. That drives a large stream of organic traffic from people who were not looking for Pinterest at all.
Unlike other social platforms, which compete with Google for attention, Pinterest quietly benefits from it.
The shopping pivot has been the growth unlock. Under CEO Bill Ready (former Google and PayPal executive who took over in 2022), Pinterest aggressively invested in shopping features — catalog integrations, buyable pins, merchant verification, and visual search for products.
The thesis: Pinterest users are already in a shopping mindset, so removing friction between "I like this" and "I bought this" is the straightforward path to revenue growth.
THE HARD PART
Palantir
The ethical debate follows Palantir everywhere. Privacy advocates have criticized Palantir's work with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), police departments, and intelligence agencies.
The company has been accused of enabling mass surveillance. Karp has been unapologetic — arguing that democracies need powerful analytical tools and it's better that a company with ethical guidelines builds them than the alternative.
Customer concentration was a historical risk. For years, a handful of massive government contracts drove the majority of revenue.
Losing a single contract could crater a quarter. The push into commercial has diversified the revenue base, but government still represents over 55% of revenue.
Valuation has been the market debate. Palantir trades at astronomical revenue multiples (60-80x revenue at its 2024 peaks), which assumes massive future growth that may or may not materialize.
Bears argue it's the most overvalued stock in tech. Bulls argue that AIP will drive exponential commercial growth.
The debate is loud and ongoing.
Pinterest's demographics are both an advantage and a limitation. The platform skews heavily female (over 60% women) and is strongest in home, fashion, food, and weddings.
Expanding beyond these categories to attract male users, younger demographics, and different use cases has been slow.
Competition for ad dollars is fierce. Pinterest competes with Meta, Google, TikTok, and Amazon for advertising budgets.
Most advertisers allocate the bulk of their spend to Meta and Google first, then consider others. Pinterest needs to prove its return on ad spend is competitive to win larger budget allocations.
Creator economy is underdeveloped. While Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have massive creator ecosystems with monetization tools, Pinterest has historically been about content discovery, not content creation.
Users pin other people's content — the original creators often don't even know their work is on Pinterest. Building a creator program and driving original content creation on the platform has been a recent focus but lags far behind competitors.
THE PRODUCTS
Palantir
Palantir Gotham — the original intelligence platform used by government agencies for counterterrorism, military operations, and law enforcement. Integrates and analyzes data from disparate classified and unclassified sources.
Palantir Foundry — the commercial platform that lets corporations build data-driven applications without coding. Used for supply chain optimization, clinical trials, financial modeling, and manufacturing.
Palantir AIP (Artificial Intelligence Platform) — launched in 2023, this layer brings large language models and generative AI into Palantir's existing platforms, letting users query and act on their data using natural language. The product that supercharged the stock price.
Palantir Apollo — a continuous delivery system that manages software deployment across every environment: cloud, on-premise, classified networks, and even air-gapped military systems.
Pinterest Home Feed — the core discovery surface showing personalized pins based on user interests, boards, and search history. Pinterest Lens — visual search technology that lets users take a photo of any object and find similar items to buy on Pinterest.
Pinterest Shopping — integrated e-commerce allowing users to browse and purchase products directly from pins linked to retailer catalogs. Pinterest Boards — the organizing system where users save and categorize pins into collections, used for wedding planning, home renovation, recipes, fashion, and more.
Pinterest Shuffles — a collage-making app for Gen Z users to create aesthetic mood boards, driving younger user adoption.
WHO BACKED THEM
Palantir
In-Q-Tel (the CIA's venture arm) was the first investor and provided both capital and credibility. Peter Thiel's Founders Fund invested from the founding.
The company raised extensively from institutional investors including Tiger Global, Dragoneer, and Sompo Holdings. The September 2020 direct listing on the NYSE (similar to Spotify — no new shares sold) valued the company at approximately $22 billion.
The stock subsequently surged past a $200 billion market cap in early 2025.
Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz were early investors. Fidelity and Valiant Capital participated in later rounds.
Rakuten invested strategically. The April 2019 IPO raised $1.4 billion at a $12.7 billion valuation.
Elliott Management, the activist investor, took a large stake in 2022 and pushed for operational improvements that contributed to the company's path to profitability.