With its explosion on Tuesday following a blowout earnings report, Palantir (NASDAQ: PLTR) crossed a market cap of $200 billion for the first time. The company is now one of the most valuable software-as-a-service (SaaS) stocks in the world.
After its surge, the stock is now ahead of more established pure-play software companies such as Adobe, Shopify, and ServiceNow, closing Tuesday with a market cap of $236.5 billion.
Right now, the only American software company with a higher market cap than Palantir is Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the leading customer relationship management software company and pioneer in cloud software.
Palantir and Salesforce are at different stages of their lifecycles. Salesforce’s revenue growth has fallen to just single digits for the first time in its history.
Palantir, on the other hand, just saw its revenue growth accelerate for the sixth quarter in a row. Both companies have recently introduced new AI products, and Palantir’s artificial intelligence platform (AIP) is driving rapid adoption among its U.S. commercial and government businesses.
The company, which started out as a defense tech firm and has since expanded to serve commercial businesses, seems to have little direct competition in AI. In its 10-K report, Palantir says, “We are fundamentally competing with the internal software development efforts of our potential customers,” and added that its customers often come to it after trying to build their own data platforms.
On the earnings call, Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar said, “Palantir’s real competition is a lack of accountability in government.”
That strength helps explain why Palantir’s revenue growth accelerated to 36% and its margins continue to expand. According to the company, its AIP has helped banks accelerate back-office processes from five days to less than three minutes.
Salesforce, on the other hand, introduced Agentforce, its agentic AI platform. While the new program has yet to have an an impact on Salesforce’s bottom line, the company is well positioned to leverage the potential in AI with Agentforce, which has more than 150,000 customers. Moreover, customer relationship management lends itself to an AI assistant.
There’s another key difference between Palantir and Salesforce. Even though Salesforce’s market cap is now less than 50% higher than Palantir’s, there are significant differences in the sizes of their underlying businesses.
Salesforce’s revenue is still more than 10 times Palantir’s:
