Insider learned that Palantir’s $26.2 million contract could give any police officer in Germany access to the monitoring company’s analytics tools.
The police agency in Bavaria, a German state of about 13 million people and the country’s capital, signed the agreement in March this year, according to the British newspaper The Guardian. press release From the Bavarian Criminal Police Office. New details show how important these foreign deals are to Palantir as it looks to further international expansion, particularly in Europe.
Aldo Verbol, an investigator and spokesperson for the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office, told Insider that the agreement is worth €5 million per year, or $26.2 million over five years. Any federal or state police agency in Germany is allowed to use two Palantir tools without the agencies having to purchase them individually, according to the press release.
Jan Hiserich, a spokesperson for Palantir, told Insider that the framework agreement allows individual German police agencies to contact Palantir and prepare for their programs. This saves time by avoiding the country’s negotiating process for individual government contracts, which is a longer process, Hissrich said.
Bavaria’s deal with Palantir is part of the nationwide “20/20 Police Program” for German police, an IT initiative aimed at giving German police uniforms access to digital tools and information. Palantir will specifically be transformed into “VeRA”, a nationwide multi-action research and analysis system.
In Blantyre Q1 Update for investorsBlantyre said the German framework agreement gives police access to Gotham’s specialized law enforcement tools, and a foundry, which it isn’t.
Palantir has marketed extensively to US agencies, but its technology can be prohibitively expensive for some state and local law enforcement. The Los Angeles Police Department, for example, needs Federal assistance To purchase Palantir tools, BuzzFeed News reported in 2020. A new framework agreement with German police is a recent example of how the company is increasingly looking outside the United States for opportunities.
The company’s CEO, Alex Karp, also visited officials in Ukraine earlier this month. Mikhailo Fedorov, Minister of Digital Transformation of the country In an Instagram post After the meeting, he said that Palantir “plans to open an office in Ukraine and start joint development with Ukrainian specialists,” according to a translation. The company has not yet published job listings located in Ukraine.
Gotham and Foundry works by analyzing and sorting through the data the agency already owns. Verbole declined to specify which police databases would be incorporated into Palantir’s tools, but said: “The goal is to identify correlations between the various data that are already available.”
Verbol told Insider that the Palantir contract is “currently in progress” and “not yet available for live operation.” He did not say when direct access to Gotham and Foundry would begin.
Palantir has done business with two other state police agencies in Germany in the past: North Rhine-Westphalia State Police Force and the Hessen State Police. However, those agreements were more limited, and only allowed Palantir to have access to police officers working for those agencies.
Harald Bickert, head of the Bavarian Criminal Police Office, said in a statement: press release Palantir’s role in VeRA will be to combat “terrorism, organized crime, and serious forms of crime such as sexual violence against children,” according to a translation.
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