Over the past decade, US tech giant Palantir has become deeply embedded inside European governments, militaries and critical infrastructure. Amid the shifting sands around the US administration, bellicose European governments are turning away from the American data and AI software giant and looking for alternatives on home soil.

Concerns about the US gaining access to sensitive European data via the Cloud Act, fears of a “kill switch” scenario that might be leveraged by the White House, and the obvious issues of dependence on a US provider have led European governments to look closer to home. Certainly, Palantir's closeness to the Trump administration has been a major factor in all this, as the FT recently pointed out.

Originally founded by Peter Thiel with backing from the CIA’s venture capital arm, Palantir has grown into one of the world’s most influential companies. Its Gotham, Foundry and Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) software underpins defence, intelligence and major enterprise operations around the world. 

Arguably, no single European company currently matches Palantir in an all-encompassing combination of data integration, ontology, AI orchestration, government security accreditations and years of deployment in both defence and intelligence.

NATO's Admiral Pierre Vandier has been blunt in his conviction that there is currently no single competitor for the controversial American data-analytics company.

“As far as I know, today there is no real competitor for Palantir,” he told Politico, in May this year.

But he added that European governments need to prove they can deliver alternatives fast: “It’s a race. It’s the ability of Europeans to show that they are able to provide something which is relevant in a matter of months, years and not a decade.”

However, Europe has a growing ecosystem of specialists, and founders and builders are realising the opportunity to capitalise on the growing need and urgency for European sovereignty.

France’s domestic intelligence agency DGSI, for example, has stated that it is phasing out working with Palantir in favour of French rival ChapsVision (see below).

“We ​must use our own AI models; we cannot accept new strategic dependencies in the digital sphere,” French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said on ⁠X. “We cannot rely on tools developed by foreign powers. France must have its own tools.”

There is increasing concern across European governments about their reliance on US-based technology, particularly following the decision in Washington last month for Anthropic to disable its most advanced AI model for all non-US users.

In Germany, Digital Minister Karsten Wildberger is calling for a European alternative to Palantir and, according to Reuters, the military has said it will not contract any US companies. Denmark has also announced it is trying to build its own alternative to the American giant, while in the UK, where there are a number of public contracts with Palantir, many are calling for contracts to be scrapped and a £330m deal with the NHS signed in 2023 to be broken using a 2027 break clause.

MPs are calling Palantir’s increasing presence in the public sector an “unacceptable point of weakness”.

So which companies are placed to fill in what could be a potentially very large — and very lucrative — gap in the market?

In no particular order, here are Pathfounders’ top five companies that could look to be Europe’s answer to Palantir:

Founded by serial entrepreneur Olivier Dellenbach in 2019, ChapsVision has already done what most European startups are, so far, only talking about: it has displaced Palantir from a live contract.

France's domestic intelligence service DGSI chose ChapsVision over Palantir, and Germany's domestic intelligence agency has reportedly picked the company’s ArgonOS software as well.

While it is clearly at a significantly earlier stage than Palantir — it is currently at around €200 million in turnover vs. Palantir's ~$7.6 billion 2026 forecast — it is attracting attention as one of Europe’s emerging defence AI infrastructure companies.

Widely regarded as one of Europe’s leading defence AI startups, Helsing has become a flagship example of Europe’s push for strategic autonomy in defence tech.

It has just secured a striking $1.8bn Series E at an $18bn valuation, positioning it as one of Europe’s most valuable startups.

It is backed by Spotify founder Daniel Ek, Lightspeed, General Catalyst, Accel, and Saab, and has already been integrated into major European military platforms, including the Eurofighter Typhoon and Saab’s Gripen E, and was selected for Germany’s Future Combat Air System.

The German company only sells to democracies and NATO countries, which positions it well politically as a “trusted” alternative to Palantir. Its active customers include Ukraine, Estonia, and Germany, with most orders coming from the latter government.

Recently, however, it has been associated with some controversy as it has expanded well beyond software into full weapons manufacturing. Ek’s involvement has, in turn, seen a swell of backlash against his company Spotify, with some artists even leaving the music platform in protest of his investment.

Arcadia is a French AI-powered military command-and-control system, explicitly positioned as a rival to Maven.

While technically this isn’t just one company, Arcadia is a consortium of French companies that is explicitly being positioned as a European alternative to Maven, the Palantir-built system used by NATO.

The decision to bring together big players, including Mistral AI and defence primes Thales, Airbus and Safran.AI suggests that the strongest opponent to the Goliath Palantir could be a state-backed, multi-company collective, rather than a single startup on its own.

This reflects Europe's broader strategy of building a sovereign AI ecosystem rather than relying on a single vendor comparable to Palantir, which might be a faster and more realistic solution.

Only in early stages right now, the system was tested during a NATO interoperability exercise in Poland last month and, if successful moving forward, could be a real contender in replacing Maven for governments across Europe.

Boasting the longest track record of any of the companies on this list, Siren, which was founded in 2014, was competing with Palantir for investigative analytics long before the AI boom.

According to co-founder Giovanni Tummarello, Siren even won some of Palantir’s former clients way back in 2017 — predominantly because of lower prices. 

That was a long time ago now in the lifespans of these companies, but to this day it markets itself as “the only true alternative to Palantir”.

While the software-only company isn’t attempting to replicate Palantir's full platform, it does compete on flexibility and openness, integrating with existing tools and infrastructure.

Siren also recently took a strategic investment from Elastic (the Elasticsearch company) to build out an AI-driven “K9” investigation assistant, aimed at national security, law enforcement and financial-crime investigators.

Last, and by no means least, is Valarian, who you may have seen featured on Pathfounders last week.

Built by a former Palantir managing director, the company raised $50m Series A this week led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), bringing its total funding up to $70m.

Co-founder Josh McLaughlin spent 12 years at Palantir, served as a managing director when he left three years ago, and is now trying to address one of the biggest objections governments have to using American AI. 

Unsurprisingly, very similar to Palantir in many ways, Valarian sells directly to governments and defence/compliance buyers. 

“They keep all of that data sovereign inside the enterprise,” co-founder Max Buchan told Pathfounders. “They don’t give Valarian any information, and they don’t give a frontier model company any information. The premise is to build a walled garden around the enterprise or defence institution.”

Whether any one of these companies has the potential to become “the European Palantir” is perhaps the wrong question.

Europe’s strategy appears to be building a collection of specialist companies — from defence AI and investigations to sovereign infrastructure — that together reduce dependence on a single American supplier.

This fragmented approach suggests that while no single firm will achieve Palantir’s ubiquity, the collective impact will be a robust, localised alternative for the continent, and these might just be the companies that make up that ecosystem of European alternatives.