Jeremy David and Drew Goldstein had no healthcare experience when they tried to use Palantir's software platform to disrupt hospital operations in their mid-20s.
Now they work with top health systems such as Mount Sinai and HCA Healthcare, competing with dozens of healthcare startups in AI races.
Palantir, a $193 billion data giant, is best known for its AI-powered military surveillance software sold to customers like the US Department of Defense, and for its finance data analytics tools that sell to corporate clients like Morgan Stanley.
But Palantir's healthcare business, launched about four years ago, is picking up steam. David said the healthcare segment currently accounted for around 15% of Palantir's commercial revenue in 2024, reaching $702 million in 2024. Palantir said hospitals saved millions of dollars with technology for optimizing healthcare revenues and managing workforces, and helped them improve patient outcomes using tools from sepsis detection to hospital detection.
David and Goldstein attribute the rapid growth of the business to its robust combination of partnerships. Palantir has signed numerous multi-year contracts with healthcare systems such as Cleveland Clinic, Tampa General and Nebraska Medicine.
The unfair benefits of Palantir in healthcare are clear. The company has depth of resources and financial support that are rarely given to healthcare startups.
However, Palantir is not entirely promoting other healthcare companies. The data company began a partnership with R1 RCM in March. RCM is the Revenue Cycle Management Company, which was acquired by Tower Brook and CD&R in August with a $8.9 billion take private deal. Palantir also launched a program called Healthstart last year, equipping healthcare startups with tools such as Palantir's developer platform.
“The information security challenges of handling exclusive electronic medical record players and patient health information make accessing health care issues extremely difficult,” Goldstein said. “If startup teams all over the world can access those issues, make it easier to solve them faster and democratize them, I think it's worth it for the whole market.”
Arnd Wiegmann/Reuters
How Palantir is trying to change healthcare
Palantir launched the healthcare push in 2021, working with the Cleveland Clinic and General Tampa when Goldstein and David were 25 years old.
They were given a tall job: promise these huge medical institutions. In two months, we promise to deploy customized Palantir software to promote value.
“When we were cast as people here to fix the hospital, we'll show up as two 25-year-olds. I hate you by default, so that's a hilarious position,” David said.
Goldstein and David, now 29, have set out to build health system software in three buckets: revenue cycle management, staffing and scheduling, and patient capacity management.
To manage the revenue cycle, Goldstein and David aimed to help hospitals earn revenue and automate the entire process from coding to filing claims and handling insurance denials. They have decided to partner with R1 RCM as it will help the business manage the entire RCM process on top of Palantir's platform. In contrast, many startups can only work on a subset of the revenue cycle tasks, Goldstein said.
On the workforce management side, Palantir began working with Nashville-based HCA Healthcare in 2023 to schedule providers with AI, taking into account clinician preferences and other staffing constraints. Palantir says it deploys customized workforce management software to hospitals with around 75 health systems for more than 40,000 nurses.
Palantir's 120-person, powerful healthcare team has been working only with hospitals so far, but David said he and Goldstein are having more conversations about where they can plug into other parts of the healthcare system, such as helping Palantir manage the interactions between payer and providers.
“If we can automate and improve the interface between payers and providers, then that market is hundreds of billions of dollars and no one is doing a good job with that,” David said.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp. Fabris Kofini/AFP
Palantir's entry into healthcare has not come without criticism. In 2023, the company won a seven-year contract with the UK's National Health Service, approximately $415 million, creating a unified patient data platform. The contract was filled with public protests over concerns that data would be mishandled due to Palantil's work with US immigration and customs enforcement, which human rights groups allegedly used to promote family separation and deportation.
Goldstein revealed that another team within Palantir is working with the NHS, noting that they have not encountered the same level of data privacy concerns in the US.
Referring to the criticism, he pointed to Palantier CEO Alex Carp's long history of support for American innovation and his candid criticism of the pace of European technological development.
“We can find around 1 million videos from CEOs talking about why America is 100 times better at solving problems than Europe right now,” Goldstein said.
