Do you need a Palantir partner to build on Foundry?

What the partner programme is for

Palantir's partner ecosystem exists mainly to resell and to staff very large programmes. If you are procuring Foundry for the first time, a partner can help with licensing and with the initial platform deployment. If you already have a tenancy and want something built in it, the partner badge matters much less than the engineers who will do the work.

What an independent consultant can do

Anyone with the right permissions in your Foundry tenancy can build in it: ontology design, pipelines, Workshop applications, AIP agents, Contour and Quiver analyses, data connections. None of this requires partner status. It requires people who know the platform and, more importantly, who know your business well enough to design an ontology that reflects how your underwriters or analysts actually think.

An independent is also free to tell you when Foundry is the wrong tool. A reseller is not.

When a smaller build makes sense

Many organisations have a Foundry licence and a long list of things they meant to build on it. A focused, fixed-scope engagement — one ontology slice, one Workshop app, one AIP agent — can be live in six to twelve weeks and prove the value of the platform to the people paying for it. That is a different shape of work from a forty-person programme, and it suits a small senior team better than a large one.

What to ask before you choose

Will the engineer who scopes the work also build it? Will the build happen in our tenancy, with our data, and be handed over documented? How long have they been building on Foundry specifically, and what else have they built? How fast can they turn around a change to a Workshop app? That last question is more revealing than it sounds: the standard AIP developer tooling is slow, and a team that has solved that will tell you so.

Treefrog is an independent consultancy, not a Palantir partner or reseller. Our Palantir practice launched in 2026. Every engineer on it has at least ten years of software development experience, and design is overseen by our founder, who has spent 27 years building (re)insurance systems. We use a way of working that makes AIP builds dramatically faster than the out-of-the-box experience.

Frequently asked