Palantir CEO Expects To Hire Hundreds More — Says Only Disaster 'We Did Not Predict' Was...

Palantir Technologies Inc (NYSE: PLTR) CEO Alex Karp has reportedly said the company is still looking to expand its headcount even as it examines its spending and faces economic uncertainty.

Karp told Reuters on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos that this year, the company anticipates adding "a couple hundred" people to its roughly 3,500 staff, in line with prior years of expansion, even as peers in the technology industry slash their workforce.

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The company, which for years planned for war, political upheaval and a souring economy, didn’t plan for a pandemic which Karp said was "the only disaster I think we did not predict." 

Palantir had "a basement filled with things prepared (but) no masks," he joked.

Client Spends: Karp also said the company was doing well in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada while evaluating spend in slower markets. "Things could get much, much worse, and then of course everything's on the table," Karp said.

According to the report, Karp stated that one Palantir client stated cutting down spending on cloud computing among its top priorities, and Palantir was partnering with Cloudflare Inc (NYSE: NET) to monitor such usage. "They're under enormous cost pressure. This is just a huge cost center, and they need to find ways to do the same things cheaper," he said. 

Palantir announced a strategic partnership with Cloudflare last week to provide organizations with the ability to quickly generate meaningful cost savings from their existing cloud bills and transition to a more cost-efficient cloud infrastructure for the long term.

Shares of Palantir have gained over 8% this year.

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Read more Davos Summit coverage by Benzinga here.

Photo by WEF on Flickr