Alex Karp rings the alarm for salespeople, saying Palantir's teams crushed earnings with a 'miniscule and shrinking' head count

Palantir CEO Alex Karp took a victory lap over the company’s explosive growth, saying it managed to boost its commercial business using a “miniscule and shrinking” sales team.

In the shareholder letter accompanying Monday’s second-quarter results, Karp said it was another case of Palantir ignoring the norms of growing a business. “On a quarter-by-quarter basis, our US commercial business grew 28%.

Such growth — indeed, such acceleration — gives the impression that what others might require a year or even longer to achieve, we can do in 90 days,” Karp wrote. “It must be noted that we have achieved these results with a minuscule and shrinking sales head count, another way in which we have discarded conventional wisdom in favor of our own, unique path,” he added.

Palantir posted $1.9 billion in quarterly revenue globally, up 93% year over year, and $1.1 billion in profit.

The company earned more in profit last quarter than it booked in total revenue a year earlier, Karp said.

US commercial revenue hit a record $764 million, a 149% jump from a year earlier and 28% growth from the prior quarter alone.

Total US revenue reached $1.6 billion, up 115%.

He has put numbers to the sales claim before.

On May’s first-quarter call, Karp said Palantir had roughly 70 salespeople and that only seven of them really sell, work he said a comparable company would need 7,000 people to do.

His May letter put annualized revenue per employee at $1.5 million.

Karp’s comments reflect a growing trend in the AI world: the rise of so-called “Tiny Teams” — where companies use AI to do much of the work traditionally done by human employees, cutting both costs and head count.

Palantir’s own head count is a more complicated case.

Karp told CNBC in 2025 that he wanted Palantir to grow tenfold while reducing staff to about 3,600.

The 2025 annual report instead listed 4,429 full-time employees, up 13% on the year.

Karp has distinguished Palantir’s approach from outright job cuts.

On the tech show TBPN in June, he said executives who boast that AI lets them fire much of their staff might as well sign up for “the Bernie Sanders manifesto.” Karp said the US commercial business, despite the growth, is still “just nascent.”