Palantir, the data analytics company co-founded by Peter Thiel, is already an active tech player in the scrum for federal contracts, but it’s playing a new and increasingly prominent role in providing the government with software tools to address the COVID-19 crisis.
This month, the Department of Veterans Affairs awarded a new $5 million contract to Palantir through veteran-owned software reseller i3 Federal LLC, which lists Palantir as a partner. The contract, set to run through November, will provide the VA with Palantir’s Gotham software to “track and analyze COVID-19 outbreak areas and make timely decisions with insight into supply chain capacity, hospital inventory, social service utilization and lab diagnostics.”
Palantir’s Gotham tool, best known for its use by law enforcement agencies, is one of the company’s main products and collects disparate data streams onto one platform. Twitter user Jack Poulson first spotted the contract, which was later reported by FedScoop.
A smaller contract also listed this month awards Palantir $2 million to provide the National Institutes of Health within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) a”COVID-19 dataset aggregation proof of concept.”
Palantir moved early to provide its services to governments grappling with the threat of the coronavirus and by mid-March was already working with the CDC to model infection patterns and anticipate hospital equipment needs.
In April, HHS awarded two contracts worth nearly $25 million to the company for a software platform called HHS Protect Now, intended to inform public health decisions made by the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force. HHS didn’t solicit competition for those contracts, noting that the COVID-19 crisis created a situation of “unusual and compelling urgency.”
