Palantir’s chief executive, Alex Karp, will be the lead investor in the former Ukrainian defense minister’s new weapons technology start-up, signaling that Russia’s war against Kyiv has spurred advances in weapons technology that can be deployed elsewhere.
Karp, the controversial co-founder of data management company Palantir, said his investment in the new venture, led by the recently ousted Ukrainian defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov, will help bring the country’s “knowledge and acumen about the art of war, as a product to allied countries,” according to a statement from Fedorov’s spokesperson.
The venture, which does not have a public name or specific focus, intends to be a company that leverages the lessons Ukrainians have learned from their war with Russia, and turn it into technology available in Ukraine and other countries.
“During the full-scale war, our team gained unique experience working with defense technologies in Ukraine and seeing firsthand how technology is transforming modern warfare,” Fedorov said. “Now we want to use this experience to build technologies that will strengthen Ukraine, help our allies and ultimately make the world safer.”
The war in Ukraine, which started more than four years ago, has ushered in an era of drone warfare and sparked advances in technology for battlefield operations. Karp, in a May interview with the Ukrainian government-run media outlet UNITED24, heaped praise on Kyiv’s military officials and defense industry.
“The Ukrainians who are involved have built among the most important, easy-to-use, interactive, and adaptive targeting systems in the world,” he said. “You can go from being a country that everyone believed was going to lose to a country that believes it’s going to win in four years.”
The Palantir chief’s technology, such as the Pentagon’s Project Maven AI target identification system and ImmigrationOS, which helps support the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, has sparked backlash among lawmakers and citizens.
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