Palantir (PLTR) stock surged in after-hours trading on Monday after the company reported second quarter results that beat analyst estimates across the board as its revenue topped $1 billion in a quarter for the first time.
“The growth rate of our business has accelerated radically,” Palantir CEO Alex Karp said. “Yet we see no reason to pause, to relent, here.”
Shares in the defense technology giant were up more than 4% in after-hours trade on Monday.
In its second quarter, Palantir posted earnings per share of $0.16, beating consensus estimates of $0.14 and up 77% from the same quarter last year. Revenue came in at $1.004 billion, Palantir’s first quarter surpassing the billion-dollar mark on a quarterly basis. The company’s top line also beat analyst forecasts for $939.25 billion and was up 48% year-over-year.
US commercial revenue came in at $306 million, growing 93% year-over-year, while US government revenue for the quarter was $426 million, up 53% from the same quarter last year. Analysts had estimated that sales for the two sectors would come in at $273 million and $391 million, respectively.
In May, shares of Palantir fell 12% the day after its first quarter results as investors scrutinized the company’s valuation and declining sales in its international commercial business, which sells software to businesses abroad, even as its first quarter revenue blew past Wall Street’s forecasts.
On Monday, Palantir raised its 2025 full-year revenue guidance to $4.14-$4.15 billion, above Wall Street’s estimate of $3.91 billion. The company also noted in its report that it closed $2.27 billion of total contract value in the quarter, up 140% from the same quarter last year.
Karp attributed much of the company’s success to Palantir’s integration of AI technology into its offerings.
“It has been a steep and upward climb—an ascent that is a reflection of the remarkable confluence of the arrival of language models, the chips necessary to power them, and our software infrastructure,” Karp said in a letter to shareholders, “one that allows organizations to tether the power of artificial intelligence to objects and relationships in the real world.”
“For a startup, even one only a thousandth of our size, this growth rate would be striking, the talk of the town,” Karp said. “For a business of our scale, however, it is, we continue to believe, nearly without precedent or comparison.”
“This was a phenomenal quarter … We are guiding to the highest sequential quarterly revenue growth in our company’s history,” Karp said.
In another boon to the company’s US government business, Palantir announced last week that it signed a deal rolling up contracts with the US Army for a value of up to $10 billion over the next decade.
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, a noted Palantir bull, said the deal is “one of the largest ever DOD [Department of Defense] software contracts in US history.”
“We believe this deal represents an additional tailwind for PLTR with AI initiatives across the US government accelerating with AI a strategic focus on the federal front and Palantir in the sweet spot to benefit from a tidal wave of federal spending on AI,” Ives wrote in a note to investors Friday.
Palantir stock is up more than 110% this year against the S&P 500’s 7.4% gain.
Some on Wall Street have concerns about Palantir’s valuation, and shares currently trade at levels 24 times the historical market multiple of the S&P 500 (^GSPC).
“We cannot rationalize why Palantir is the most expensive name in our software coverage,” RBC Capital Markets analyst Rishi Jaluria wrote in a note to clients before Palantir published its Q2 earnings. “Absent a substantial beat-and-raise quarter elevating the NT [near term] growth trajectory, valuation seems unsustainable.”
Jake Conley is a breaking news reporter covering US equities for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X at @byjakeconley or email him at jake.conley@yahooinc.com.
