KYIV, Ukraine \u2014 Ukraine\u2019s recently ousted defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov is teaming up with Palantir CEO Alex Karp to launch a new defense company focused on developing technology that will \u201cultimately make the world safer,\u201d the duo announced on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
The former minister left office in July<\/a> but had said little about his future outside of government until last weekend, when he confirmed that he would not be returning to government and that he would instead begin focusing on several new projects \u2014 including building a major defense investment fund and advising the Italian Ministry of Defense.<\/p>\n \u201cDuring the full-scale war, our team gained unique experience working with defense technologies in Ukraine and seeing firsthand how technology is transforming modern warfare,\u201d Fedorov said in a press release.<\/p>\n \u201cNow we want to use this experience to build technologies that will strengthen Ukraine, help our allies and ultimately make the world safer.\u201d<\/p>\n Karp\u2019s backing could mean billions in investment for Fedorov and Ukraine\u2019s defense industry. <\/p>\n Palantir posted 93% year-over-year revenue growth last quarter, and Karp has watched the company\u2019s valuation soar past $440 billion \u2014 up nearly 28-fold from its 2020 stock market debut. Roughly half of its total revenue comes from U.S. government contracts.<\/p>\n Fedorov built his reputation as Ukraine\u2019s tech-first defense chief in part on his backing of Delta, Ukraine\u2019s state-of-the-art battlefield management system<\/a> that fuses drone feeds, radar and field data into a layered dashboard that can be used to oversee the front in real time or learn from a battle\u2019s lessons afterwards. <\/p>\n \u201cUkraine\u2019s Delta common operating system, their modular open system architecture command and control system, is absolutely incredible,\u201d outgoing U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll<\/a>, who resigned from his role this week, told the U.S. Senate in May.<\/p>\n U.S. Army systems, meanwhile, remain \u201ccompartmentalized, isolated and ineffective against modern threats,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The American equivalent of Delta is Palantir\u2019s Maven Smart System, which uses Anthropic\u2019s AI model to similarly combine real-world data and intelligence analysis into a single powerful tool for battle planning and briefing.<\/p>\n Karp was among the first Western tech executives to travel to Kyiv after Russia\u2019s 2022 invasion, and Palantir\u2019s tech has since been deployed by more than half a dozen Ukrainian government agencies.<\/p>\n Ukraine\u2019s Brave1 Dataroom, a joint project between the defense ministry and Palantir launched earlier this year, runs on Palantir\u2019s infrastructure and lets Ukrainian companies train AI models \u2014 including target-detection systems for countering Shahed-type drones \u2014 on real combat data.<\/p>\n