Qureshi: Gotham is graph-based analysis, while Foundry focuses on SQL tables
Nabeel S. Qureshi · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · May 11, 2025 · at 31:25
Former Palantir engineer Nabeel S. Qureshi contrasts the analytical paradigms behind Palantir's two flagship products, Gotham and Foundry.
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“Another big difference is the idea of graph-based analysis. So Gotham, one of the kind of early use cases, right, was finding, combing through networks of terrorists and basically finding the bad guys. And so being able to do queries that are sort of graph-based was important, right? So it's like, who is everybody that Lenny called in the last week? Imagine like all the nodes kind of fanning out from there. And then it's like, okay, well, this one looks interesting. Let's zoom in on that. What is this person's, you know, location, right? And so it's just like very graph-based way of thinking. That also applies to things like fraud, and so Gotham has been deployed against fraud, but if you look at Foundry, it doesn't actually emphasize that component so much, because it turns out, you know, let's say you're a B to B SaaS company, you're probably not doing that much graph-based analysis, you're doing things that look a lot more like classic SQL queries, tables, that kind of stuff, and so Foundry's a lot more kind of traditional in that way.”
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