Highly secretive data firm Palantir Technologies Inc., which was co-founded by Peter Thiel and part-financed by the CIA, has said it’s to acquire a Dutch data visualization and publishing startup called Silk, whose technology allows users to build interactive charts and maps. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The deal was confirmed in a blog post by Silk co-founder Salar al Khafaji, who wrote that the goal of the company has always been to help people “get the most out of their data”.
“When we met the Palantir team, we realized that we could work on even bigger and more important data problems with an incredibly talented team – even if it meant no longer working on the Silk product,” he wrote. “We decided to join Palantir because we believe we can achieve a larger impact there than we could at Silk alone.”
Silk’s software is somewhat similar to that of the better known Tableau Software Inc., and coincidentally the two companies both received funding from the prominent Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA).
A spokesperson for Tableau told GeekWire that the company was not familiar with Silk, but said they were happy to see that the demand for analytics software continues to grow, as any positive move increases awareness of the benefits of seeing and understanding data.
As for Silk itself, the platform won’t be shutting up shop any time soon. However, there will be some changes, as Al Khafaji noted in his post.
“Silk.co as a platform will continue to operate,” he wrote. “Nothing will change to current Silks, and you can still create a new Silk for free. However, because of our new roles at Palantir, Silk.co will operate “as is” and we will not be able to provide technical or customer support to new or existing Silk accounts any longer, nor will we be doing any further development work or adding new features to the hosted Silk.co product.”
The following clip takes a closer look at Silk:
Palantir, which is based in Palo Alto, Calif., specializes in creating Big Data software for government agencies and large corporations. The company is said to offer two different products – Palantir Gotham, which is used for counter-terrorism, cyber-crime analysis and fraud investigations, and Palantir Metropolis, which is financial software used by hedge funds, banks, and financial services firms. Palantir was most recently valued at close to $20 billion following a $450 million funding round last fall.
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