A few months ago Antonine got into Palantir's Startup Fellowship, 23 startups out of hundreds. Here's what we did with it.
I'd been making the same argument for a while: the bar for every deal has doubled, the firms that win run real diligence, and the lean middle-market teams who need that most can't afford how it gets delivered today. The whole question was whether I could actually build the thing that fixes that. The Fellowship is how I found out.
What we built
We built Antonine on Palantir Foundry, the same infrastructure Palantir runs in defense and intelligence, pointed at how investment firms think. Not a chat wrapper. Purpose-built agents on a typed ontology that screen teasers before an NDA, ingest the full deal package, draft the IC memo in your format with every number cited to source, and hold everything your firm has ever decided so the next deal shows up already cross-referenced against your own history.
The ontology is the product
The thing I didn't fully get until I built it: the ontology is the product.
Most AI tools forget every document the second they answer you. Building on typed objects instead of loose files is what makes the intelligence stack up over time. That's the whole reason a four-person team can run the kind of diligence that used to cost seven figures.
Where we are now
The product is live, and three firms are onboarding and running real deals through it. Solo founder, thesis to working software with users in a few months. I don't think that happens without the platform and the engineering help behind it.
What's next
We're heading to DevCon. I'll be there to talk to the other people building on Foundry and to sit down with enterprise teams feeling the squeeze firsthand.
To the Fellowship team and everyone at Palantir who took my questions and pushed back on my thinking, thank you. The bar for this industry isn't coming back down. The firms that build real systems are going to be the ones standing. We're building one.
If you run a firm and this math is keeping you up, the AI Readiness questionnaire on the site comes straight to me. I read every one and send back a plan.
Zach