Palantir is Working to Make You Live Forever

Foundry is being used by a company working to literally help you avoid death

"There are all these people who say that death is natural, it's just part of life, and I think that nothing can be further from the truth."

You know who said that? The co-founder and chairman of the company we invest in. Peter Thiel is known not only for his bold remarks and predictions but also for his wish to extend human life beyond its natural limits, funding a handful of companies and projects (like Unity Biotechnology and Google’s CALICO) with the objective of solving aging and, ultimately, beating death.

What is interesting is the fact that Palantir is also joining in this endeavor and is providing Foundry to Altos Labs, a recently created startup that is researching methods to stop and even reverse the process of aging.

Thiel has been arguing that in order to achieve that, we need to be able to understand life’s cycle and behavior and translate it into computation data, so that we can reverse it as if it were software.

“Reverse all human ailments in the same way that we can fix the bugs of a computer program. Death will eventually be reduced from a mystery to a solvable problem.”

Who is behind Altos Labs? Why is Palantir software being used by them? Well, they are quite an ambitious team, led by Doctors (both MD & PhD), Nobel recipients and other professionals and industry leaders. Co-Founded by Dr. Hal Barron, Dr. Rick Klausner and Hans Bishop, they founded this startup just 1 year ago, already racking in $3B in funding, making it the biggest biomedicine startup launch ever.

Palantir benefits from collaborating with Altos Labs not only because of the prestige of working with the most respected and notable experts in biotechnology, but because the upside in this field is, I think, greater than in any other industry. It’s unprecedented because it’s an unexplored world, still.

So how do I know Foundry is being used by Altos Labs? Links tell the story, and it’s a very interesting one. Altos Labs seems to have a Polaris project, and this project is directly using Foundry. The following link redirects to a Foundry page that then gives way to an Okta login page with direct Palantir references: polaris.altoslabs.com

Foundry access page just before redirecting to Otka

I think it’s quite safe to assume a working relationship between both companies, and the fact that they are using Foundry could be the result of a partnership to achieve industry-wide results under a shared platform (just as we see with SkyWise and Athinia), or this could only be a contract establishing them as a Palantir client. Either way, every new company that decides to use Foundry is good news!

We’ve come to the conclusion that, because everyone before us has, eventually, died, we must do so, too. But contrarians like Thiel, as their name suggest, aren’t pleased with this final eventuality, and are investing large sums of dollars in eliminating death from life. They believe they can bend nature itself. A very stark contrast to the common belief that death must exist in order for us to go forward. To renew.

“Old men must die, or the world would grow mouldy, would only breed the past again.”

Lord Tennyson

And here is where Altos Labs also wants to lend a hand. Not just in bringing aging to a halt, but to reverse it, to allow one to become younger. This is intended to be achieved via reversing the lifespan cycle of cells in injuries and diseases.

The conclusion I have for this article is that this is a very ambitious entity, with the best people they could have, with a very specific and exciting mission, although controversial. So Palantir is a perfect fit, for exactly the same reasons. They are used in almost every industry and Foundry is being implemented by the big players. It’s just a matter of scaling, and we will get there (already in the process).

There’s only one direction for Palantir: Forward.