Palantir delivers strong Q4, sees 2026 US commercial revenue surge ahead

Palantir reported better-than-expected fourth quarter results as US commercial revenue surged 137% from a year ago. 

The company reported fourth quarter net income of $609 million, or 24 cents a share, on revenue of $1.407 billion, up 70% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were 25 cents a share. 

Wall Street was expecting Palantir to report fourth quarter non-GAAP earnings of 23 cents a share on revenue of $1.34 billion. 

Palantir's story continues to revolve around strong US government sales and enterprise revenue that is quickly reaching parity. Palantir's US commercial revenue was $507 million, up 137% from a year ago. US government revenue was $570 million, up 66% from a year ago. 

In his shareholder letter, CEO Alex Karp said: “Other pockets of what some not incorrectly describe as an exuberant market for artificial intelligence systems may feel pressure to manage their businesses around their financials. Our record profit, however, is pure and uncontrived. And it is, perhaps more important, the consequence of a business built around software platforms, not legions of well-credentialed consultants with their presentations and wise counsel.”

He continued:

“The large language models alone will not lead us to salvation. They require a means of reliably and efficiently interacting with the byzantine complexity of the modern enterprise—its tangle of datasets and operations and personnel.

The strings of text produced by the language models are little without a software architecture that can lend a grammar and structure to the output of these probabilistic prediction engines. The models must be tethered to objects in the real world, and it is that tether, that means of grounding and orientation, that we have built.”

 

According to Palantir, the company closed 180 deals of at least $1 million, 84 deals of at least $5 million and 61 deals of at least $10 million. US commercial remaining deal value, a spin on remaining performance obligations, was $4.38 billion, up 145% from a year ago. 

Palantir ended the quarter with a rule of 40 score of 127% and $7.2 billion in cash and equivalents. 

For 2025, Palantir delivered net income of $1.625 billion, or 63 cents a share, on revenue of $4.475 billion, up 75% from a year ago. 

As for the outlook, Palantir projected first quarter revenue of $1.532 billion to $1.536 billion with adjusted income from operations between $870 million and $874 million. For 2026, Palantir projected US commercial revenue to grow at least 115% to $3.144 billion. Total revenue will land between $7.182 billion to $7.198 billion.

Key quotes from the earnings call:

• "Our customers aren't tentatively trying AI. They're committing to it at scale with Palantir as the driving force," said Palantir's Ryan Taylor, Chief Revenue Officer and Chief Legal Officer. "The rapid advancement of AI models is continuing to drive the commoditization of cognition. The next step is for the market to differentiate between those who are supplying the commoditization of cognition and those who are scaling the leverage made possible by it. We are the only enterprise software company that made a conscious choice to focus exclusively on the latter."
• CTO Shyam Sankar said Palantir's AI FDE (forward deployed engineer) is developing well. Palantir has created an AI agent FDE as software vendors are using the human kind. "AI FDE continues to delight. AI FDE is now capable of powering complex SAP ERP migrations from ECC to S/4, years of work now done in as little as 2 weeks. And we are generalizing AI FDE's capabilities to do this for a broader and broader set of problems at our customers," said Sankar.
• Karp: "The basket of category of AI is actually meaningless. It's the basket of category of perform and value creation with the tools we have at hand, of which AI is crucial. And to believe you can go and build companies without this is supremely dangerous. And we're going to see over the next year, companies that adopt things that actually work. We know ontology FDE orchestration is explosive and revolutionary."
• "We provide value. We deliver a high-value product. We don't want any BS about getting paid. We're not going to give you any BS about why our product didn't work and offer you a steak dinner or an event. We're going to deliver and then we get paid," said Karp.